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The Grace Of God

God of all grace, whose thoughts toward us are ever thoughts of peace and not of evil, give us hearts to believe that we are accepted in the Beloved.

And give us minds to admire that perfection of moral wisdom that found a way to preserve the integrity of heaven and yet receive us there.

We are astonished and marvel that one so holy and dread should invite us into Thy banqueting house and cause love to be the banner over us.

We cannot express the gratitude we feel, but look Thou on our hearts and read it there. Amen. In God mercy and grace are one; but as they reach us they are seen as two, related but not identical.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

As mercy is God’s goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is His goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. It is by His grace that God imputes merit where none previously existed id declares no debt to be where one had been before.

It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under just disapprobation.

Its use to us sinful men is to save us and to make, us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
We benefit eternally by God’s being just what He is.

Because He is what He is, He lifts our heads out of the prison house, changes our prison garments for royal robes, and makes us eat bread continually before Him all the days of our lives.

Grace takes its rise far back in the heart of God, in the awful and incomprehensible abyss of His holy being; but the channel through which it flows out to men is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

The apostle Paul, who beyond all others is the exponent of grace in redemption, never disassociates God’s grace from God’s crucified Son. Always in his teachings, the two are found together, organically one and inseparable.

A full and fair summation of Paul’s teaching on this subject is found in his Epistle to the Ephesians: “Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself.

According to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.

In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.”

John also in the Gospel that bears his name identifies Christ as the medium through which grace reaches mankind: “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

But right here it is easy to miss the path and go far astray from the truth, and some have done this.

They have compelled this verse to stand by itself, unrelated to other Scriptures bearing on the doctrine of grace, and have made it teach that Moses knew only law and Christ knows only grace.

So the Old Testament is made to be a book of law and the New Testament a book of grace. The truth is quite otherwise.

The law was given to men through Moses, but it did not originate with Moses. It had existed in the heart of God from before the foundation of the world.

On Mount Sinai, it became the legal code for the nation of Israel, but the moral principles it embodies are eternal.

There never was a time when the law did not represent the will of God for mankind nor a time when the violation of it did not bring its penalty, though God was patient and sometimes “winked” at wrongdoing because of the ignorance of the people.

Paul’s close-knit arguments in the third and fifth chapters of his Epistle to the Romans make this very clear.

The spring of Christian morality is the love of Christ, not the law of Moses; nevertheless, there has been no abrogation of the principles of morality contained in the law.

No privileged class exists exempt from that righteousness which the law enjoins. The Old Testament is indeed a book of law, but not of law only.

Before the great flood Noah “found grace in the eyes of the Lord,” and after the law was given God said to Moses, “Thou hast found grace in my sight.”

And how could it be otherwise? God will always be Himself, and grace is an attribute of His holy being. He can no more hide His grace than the sun can hide its brightness.

Men may flee from the sunlight to dark and musty caves of the earth, but they cannot put out the sun. So men may in any dispensation despise the grace of God, but they cannot extinguish it.

Had the Old Testament times been times of stern, unbending law alone the whole complexion of the early world would have been vastly less cheerful than we find it to be in the ancient writings.

There could have been no Abraham, friend of God; no David, man after God’s own heart; no Samuel, no Isaiah, no Daniel. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that Westminster Abbey of the spiritually great of the Old Testament, would stand dark and tenantless.

Grace made sainthood possible in Old Testament days just as it does today. No one was ever saved other than by grace, from Abel to the present moment.

Since mankind was banished from the east-ward Garden, none has ever returned to the divine favor except through the sheer goodness of God. And wherever grace found any man it was always by Jesus Christ.

Grace indeed came from Jesus Christ, but it did not wait for His birth in the manger or His death on the cross before it became operative.

Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The first man in human history to be reinstated in the fellowship of God came through faith in Christ.

In olden times men looked forward to Christ’s redeeming work; in later times they gazed back upon it, but always they came and they came by grace, through faith.

We must keep in mind also that the grace of God is infinite and eternal. As it had no beginning, so it can have no end, and being an attribute of God, it is* as boundless as infinitude.

Instead of straining to comprehend this as a theological truth, it would be better and simpler to compare God’s grace with our needs.

We can never know the enormity of our sin, neither is it necessary that we should. What we can know is that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”

To “abound” in sin: that is the worst and the most we could or can do. The word abound defines the limit of our finite abilities.

And although we feel our iniquities rise over us like a mountain, the mountain, nevertheless, has definable boundaries: it is so large, so high, it weighs only this certain amount and no more.

But who shall define the limitless grace of God? Its “much more” plunges our thoughts into infinitude and confounds them there. All thanks be to God for grace abounding.

We who feel alienated from the fellowship of God can now raise our discouraged heads and look up. Through the virtues of Christ atoning death, the cause of our banishment has been removed.

We may return as the Prodigal returned, and be welcome. As we approach the Garden, our home before the Fall, the flaming sword is withdrawn. The keepers of the Tree of Life stand aside when they see a son of grace approaching.

Return, O wanderer, now return,
And seek thy Father’s face;
Those new desires which in thee burn
Were kindled by His grace.

Return, O wanderer, now return,
And wipe the falling tears:
Thy Father calls, – no longer mourn;
‘Tis love invites thee near —William Benco Collyer

The Love Of God

Our Father which art in heaven, we Thy children are often troubled in mind, hearing within us. at once the affirmations of faith and the accusations of conscience.

We are sure that there is in us nothing that could attract the love of One as holy and as just as Thou art. Yet Thou hast declared.

Thine unchanging love for us in Christ Jesus. If nothing in us can win Thy love, nothing in the universe can prevent Thee from loving us.

Then love will cast out fear; and our troubled hearts will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou hast declared Thyself to be. Amen.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

The apostle John, by the Spirit, wrote, “God is love,” and some have taken his words to be a definitive statement concerning the essential nature of God. This is a great error. John was by those words stating a fact, but he was not offering a definition.

Equating love with God is a major mistake that has produced much unsound religious philosophy and has brought forth a spate of vaporous poetry completely out of accord with the Holy Scriptures and altogether of another climate from that of historic Christianity.

Had the apostle declared that love is what God is, we would be forced to infer that God is what love is. If God is love, then literally love is God, and we are in all duties bound to worship love as the only God there is.

If love is equal to God then God is only equal to love, and God and love are identical. Thus we destroy the concept of personality in God and deny outright all His attributes save one, and that one we substitute for God.

The God we have left is not the God of Israel; He is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; He is not the God of the prophets and the apostles.

He is not the God of the saints and reformers and martyrs, nor yet the God of the theologians and hymnists of the church.

For our souls’ sake, we must learn to understand the Scriptures. We must escape the slavery of words and give loyal adherence to meanings instead. Words should express ideas, not originate them.

We say that God is love; we say that God is light; we say that Christ is truth; and we mean the words to be understood in much the same way that words are understood when we say of a man, “He is kindness itself.”

By so saying we are not stating that kindness and the man are identical, and no one understands our words in that sense.

The words “God is love” mean that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is something true of God but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in His unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness, and truth.

Because God is immutable He always acts like Himself, and because He is a unity He never suspends one of His attributes to exercise another. From God’s other known attributes, we may learn much about His love.

We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, His love has no beginning; because He is eternal, His love can have no end; because He is infinite, it has no limit; because He is holy.

It is the quintessence of all spotless purity; because He is immense, His love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the loftiest eloquence retreats confused and abashed.

Yet if we would know God and for other’s sake tell what we know, we must try to speak of His love. All Christians have tried, but none has ever done it very well.

I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a child can grasp a star. Still, by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it.

So, as I stretch my heart toward the high, shilling love of God, someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope.

We do not know, and we may never know, what love is, but we can know how it manifests itself, and that is enough for us here. First, we see it showing itself as goodwill. Love wills the good of all and never wills harm or evil to any.

This explains the words of the apostle John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear.” Fear is the painful emotion that arises at the thought that we may be harmed or made to suffer.

This fear persists while we are subject to the will of someone who does not desire our well-being. The moment we come under the protection of one of goodwill, fear is cast out. A child lost in a crowded store is full of fear because it sees the strangers around it as enemies.

In its”mother’s arms a moment later all the terror subsides. The known goodwill of the mother casts out fear.

The world is full of enemies, and as long as we are subject to the possibility of harm from these enemies, fear is inevitable. The effort to conquer fear without removing the causes is altogether futile. The heart is wiser than the apostles of tranquillity.

As long as we are in the hands of chance, as long as we look for hope in the law of averages, as long as we must trust for survival to our ability to outthink or outmaneuver the enemy, we have every good reason to be afraid. And fear hath torment.

To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the arm of the Beloved – this and only this can cast out fear. Let a man become convinced that nothing can harm him and instantly for him all fear goes out of the universe.

The nervous reflex, the natural revulsion to physical pain may be felt sometimes, but the deep torment of fear is gone forever.

God is love and God is sovereign. His love disposes Him to desire our everlasting welfare and His sovereignty enables Him to secure it. Nothing can hurt a good man.

The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still
His kingdom is forever. —Martin Luther

God’s love tells us that He is friendly and His Word assures us that He is our friend and wants us to be His friends. No man with a trace of humility would first think that he is a friend of God, but the idea did not originate with men.

Abraham would never have said, “I am God’s friend,” but God Himself said that Abraham was His friend. The disciples might well have hesitated to claim friendship with Christ, but Christ said to them, “Ye are my friends.”

Modesty may demur at so rash a thought, but audacious faith dares to believe the Word and claim friendship with God.

We do God more honor by believing what He has said about Himself and having the courage to come boldly to the throne of grace than by hiding in self-conscious humility among the trees of the garden.

Love is also an emotional identification. It considers nothing its own but gives all freely to the object of its affection. We see this constantly in our world of men and women.

A young mother, thin and tired, nurses at her breast a plump and healthy baby, and far from complaining, the mother gazes down at her child with eyes shining with happiness and pride.

Acts of self-sacrifice are common to love. Christ said of Himself, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

It is a strange and beautiful eccentricity of the free God that He has allowed His heart to be emotionally identified with men. Self-sufficient as He is, He wants our love and will not be satisfied till He gets it.

Free as He is, He has let His heart be bound to us forever. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

“For our soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it overpasses the knowing of all creatures: that is to say, there is no creature that is made that may know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Maker loveth us.

And therefore we may with grace and His help stand in spiritual beholding, with the everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable Love that Almighty God hath to us of His Goodness.”

Another characteristic of love is that it takes pleasure in its object. God enjoys His creation. The apostle John says frankly that God’s purpose in creation was His pleasure. God is happy in His love for all that He has made.

We cannot miss the feeling of pleasure in God’s delighted references to His handiwork. Psalm 104 is a divinely inspired nature poem almost rhapsodic in its happiness, and the delight of God is felt throughout it.

“The glory of the Lord shall endure forever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works.”

The Lord takes peculiar pleasure in His saints. Many think of God as far removed, gloomy, and mightily displeased with everything.

Gazing down in a mood of fixed apathy upon a world in which He has long ago lost interest, but this is to think erroneously.

True, God hates sin and can never look with pleasure upon iniquity, but where men seek to do God’s will He responds in genuine affection.

Christ in His atonement has removed the bar to the divine fellowship. Now in Christ, all believing souls are objects of God’s delight.

“The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”

According to the Book of Job, God’s work of creation was done to musical accompaniment. “Where wast thou,” God asks.

“When I laid the foundations of the earth… when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

John Dryden carried the idea a bit further than this, but not, perhaps, too far to be true:

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When nature is underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise, ye more than dead!”

Then cold, and hot, moist, and dry,
To their stations to leap,
And Musics Oliver obeys.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.
From A Song for St. Cecilias Day”

Music is both an expression and a source of pleasure, and the pleasure that is purest and nearest to God is the pleasure of love.

Hell is a place of no pleasure because there is no love there. Heaven is full of music because it is the place where the pleasures of holy love abound.

Earth is the place where the pleasures of love are mixed with pain, for sin is here, and hate and ill will. In such a world as ours, love must sometimes suffer, as Christ suffered in giving Himself for His own.

But we have the certain promise that the causes of sorrow will finally be abolished and the new face enjoy forever a world of selfless, perfect love.

It is of the nature of love that it cannot lie quiescent. It is active, creative, and benign. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were sinners, Christ died for us.” “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.”

So it must be where love is; love must ever give to its own, whatever the cost. The apostles rebuked the young churches sharply because a few of their members had forgotten this and had allowed their love to spend itself in personal enjoyment while their brethren were in need.

“But whoso hath this world s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” So wrote that John who has been known for centuries as “the Beloved.”

The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing, too. God does not love populations, He loves people.

He loves not masses, but men. He loves us all with a mighty love that has no beginning and can have no end.

In the 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 noblest philosophy.

This love content is more than a thing; it is God Himself amid 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 God, whose height,
Whose depth unfathomed, no man knows,
I see from far Thy beauteous light,
Only I sigh for Thy repose;
My heart is pained, nor can it be
At rest till it finds rest in Thee. —Gerhard Tersteegen

The Holiness Of God

Glory be to God on high. We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, for Thy great glory Lord, Luttered 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.

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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.

Raise 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 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 God. His pain-filled cry.

“Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amid 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 God. Such an experience cannot but be emotionally violent.

Until we have seen ourselves as God sees us, we are not likely to be much disturbed by 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 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 God.

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 divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of.

God’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 God’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 electric power flows only through a conductor.

So the Spirit flows through truth and must find the 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 God.”

Theological knowledge is the medium through which the Spirit flows into the human heart, yet there must be humblo, and penitence in the heart before truth can produce faith.

The Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth. It is possible to have the 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 he means a sense that there is in the world a vague, incomprehensible Something, the Mysterium Tremen- dum, 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, undiscovered- able Presence that “runs quicksilver like through creations 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 the 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 God, but Isaiah and Paul have found the true God through His self-disclosure in the inspired Scriptures.

The feeling of 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.

God 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 a genuine personality.

More than this, He is the absolute quintessence of moral excellence, infinitely perfect in righteousness, purity, rectitude, 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 God in the Scriptures and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Christian gains everything and loses nothing.

To his idea of God, 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 God!”.

Tomorrow he may kneel with the delighted trembling to admire and adore the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.

Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is 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 God must be thought of as holy.

God 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 God’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 God 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 God, the wrath of God, and the health of the creation are inseparably united.

God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio that takes the life of her child.

God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is relative and contingent holiness.

He shares with angels and seraphim in heaven and with redeemed men on earth as their preparation for heaven.

This holiness God 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 God 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 God alone.

Before the uncreated fire of God’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 God 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 God passed by.

We must take refuge from God in God. Above all, we must believe that God sees us as perfect in His Son while He disciplines chastens, and purges us so that we may be partakers of His holiness.

By faith and obedience, by constant meditation on the holiness of God, by loving righteousness and hating iniquity, by a growing acquaintance with the Spirit of holiness.

We can acclimate ourselves to the fellowship of the saints on earth and prepare ourselves for the eternal companionship of God 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 God!
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship Thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears —Frederick W. Faber

The Sovereignty Of God

Who wouldst not fear Thee, O Lord God 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.

Were there even one datum of knowledge, however small, unknown to God, His rule would break down at that point.

To be Lord over all the creation, He must possess all knowledge. And was God lacking one infinitesimal modicum of power?

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That lack would end His reign and undo His kingdom; that one stray atom of power would belong to someone else and God would be a limited ruler and hence not sovereign.

Furthermore, His sovereignty requires that He be 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 lives its entire life in a cage made of fears, hunger, and instincts; it is limited by weather conditions and 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 assigned it by Birdland comity.

The freest bird is, along with every other created thing, held in constant check by a net of necessity. Only God is free.

God is said to be free because no one and nothing can hinder Him compel Him or stop Him. He can 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 God seems a bit meaningless, and to question it would be absurd.

Can we imagine the Lord God of Hosts having to request permission from anyone or to apply for anything to a higher body? To whom would God 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 God 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 God.”

The sovereignty of God 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 that God cannot approve of, such as evil, pain, and death.

If God is sovereign He could have prevented their coming into existence. Why did He not do so?

The Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism, the loftiest of the great non-Biblical religions, got around this difficulty neatly enough by postulating a theological dualism.

There were two Gods, Ormazd, and Ahriman, and these between them created the world. The good Ormazd made all good things and the evil Ahriman made the rest.

It was quite simple. Ormazd had no sovereignty to worry about and did not mind sharing his prerogatives with another.

For the Christian, this explanation will not do, for it flatly contradicts the truth taught so emphatically throughout the whole Bible.

That there is one God and that He alone created the heaven and the earth and all the things that are therein. God’s attributes are such as to make impossible the existence of another God.

The Christian admits that he does not have the final answer to the riddle of permitted evil. But he knows what that answer is not. And he knows that the Zend-Avesta does not have it either.

While a complete explanation of the origin of sin eludes us, there are a few things we do know. In His sovereign wisdom, God has permitted evil to exist in carefully restricted areas of His creation.

A kind of fugitive outlaw whose activities are temporary and limited in scope. In doing this God has acted according to His infinite wisdom and goodness.

More than that no one knows at present; and more than that no one needs to know. The name of God is a sufficient guarantee of the perfection of His works.

Another real problem created by the doctrine of divine sovereignty has to do with the will of man. If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees.

How is it possible for a man to exercise free choice? And if he can not exercise freedom of choice, how can he be held responsible for his conduct?

Is he not a mere puppet whose actions are determined by a behind-the-scenes God who pulls the strings as it pleases Him?

The attempt to answer these questions has divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacobus Arminius and John Calvin.

Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man. It appears possible.

However, to reconcile these two positions without doing violence to either, although the effort that follows may prove deficient to partisans of one camp or the other.

Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil.

When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, since the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it.

If in His absolute freedom, God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, “What does thou?”

Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.

Perhaps a homely illustration might help us to understand. An ocean liner leaves New York bound for Liverpool. Its destination has been determined by proper authorities.

Nothing can change it. This is at least a faint picture of sovereignty. On board the liner are several scores of passengers.

These are not in chains, neither are their activities determined for them by decree. They are completely free to move about as they will.

They eat, sleep, play, lounge about on the deck, read, and talk, altogether as they please; but all the while the great liner is carrying them steadily onward toward a predetermined port.

Both freedom and sovereignty are present here and they do not contradict each other. So it is, I believe, with man’s freedom and the sovereignty of God.

The mighty liner of God’s sovereign design keeps its steady course over the sea of history. God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward.

The fulfillment of those eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. We do not know all that is included in those purposes.

But enough has been disclosed to furnish us with a broad outline of things to come and to give us good hope and firm assurance of future well-being.

We know that God will fulfill every promise made to the prophets; we know that sinners will someday be cleansed out of the earth.

We know that a ransomed company will enter into the joy of God and that the righteous will shine forth in the kingdom of their Father;

we know that God’s perfections will yet receive universal acclamation and that all created intelligence will own Jesus Christ.

Lord to the glory of God the Father, that the present imperfect order will be done away, and a new heaven and a new earth be established forever.

Toward all this God is moving with infinite wisdom and perfect precision of action. No one can dissuade Him from His purposes.

Nothing turns Him aside from His plans. Since He is omniscient, there can be no unforeseen circumstances, and no accidents.

As He is sovereign, there can be no countermanded orders, no breakdown in authority; and as He is omnipotent, there can be no want of power to achieve His chosen ends. God is sufficient unto Himself for all these things.

In the meanwhile things are not as smooth as this quick outline might suggest. The mystery of iniquity doth already work.

Within the broad field of God’s sovereign, permissive will the deadly conflict of good with evil continues with increasing fury.

God will yet have His way in the whirlwind and the storm, but the storm and the whirlwind are here, and as responsible beings, we must make our choice in the present moral situation.

Certain things have been decreed by the free determination of God, and one of these is the law of choice and consequences.

God has decreed that all who willingly commit themselves to His Son Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith shall receive eternal life and become sons of God.

He has also decreed that all who love darkness and continue in rebellion against the high authority of heaven shall remain in a state of spiritual alienation and suffer eternal death at last.

Reducing the whole matter to individual terms, we arrive at some vital and highly personal conclusions. In the moral conflict now raging around us whoever is on God’s side is on the winning side and cannot lose;

whoever is on the other side is on the losing side and cannot win. Here there is no chance, no gamble. There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made.

By the mercy of God, we may repent of a wrong choice and alter the consequences by making a new and right choice. Beyond that, we cannot go.

The whole matter of moral choice centers around Jesus Christ. Christ stated it plainly: “He that is not with me is against me,” and “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

The gospel message embodies three distinct elements: an announcement, a command, and a call. It announces the good news of redemption accomplished in mercy.

it commands all men everywhere to repent and it calls all men to surrender to the terms of grace by believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

We must all choose whether we will obey the gospel or turn away in unbelief and reject its authority. Our choice is our own, but the consequences of the choice have already been determined by the sovereign will of God, and from this there is no appeal.

The Lord descended from above,
And bowed the heavens most high,
And underneath His feet
He cast The darkness of the sky.

On cherubim and seraphim
Full royally, He rode,
And on the wings of mighty winds
Came flying all abroad.

He sat serenely upon the floods,
Their fury to restrain;
And He, as sovereign Lord and King,
For evermore shall reign.
Psalm paraphrase, —Thomas Sternhold

The Open Secret

When viewed from the perspective of eternity, the most critical need of this hour may well be that the Church should be brought back from her long Babylonian captivity.

And the name of God is glorified in her again as of old. Yet we must not think of the Church as an anonymous body a mystical religious abstraction.

What can we plain Christians do to bring back the departed glory? Is there some secret we may learn? Is there a formula for personal revival we can apply to the present situation?

To our situation? The answer to these questions is yes. Yet the answer may easily disappoint some persons, for it is anything but profound.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

I bring no esoteric cryptogram, no mystic code to be painfully deciphered. I appeal to no hidden law of the unconscious, no occult knowledge meant only for the few.

The secret is an open one which the wayfaring man may read. It is simply the old and ever-new counsel: Acquaint thyself with God.

To regain her lost power the Church must see heaven opened and have a transforming vision of God.

But the God we must see is not the utilitarian God who is having such a run of popularity today, whose chief claim to men’s attention is His ability.

To bring them success in their various undertakings, and who for that reason is being cajoled and flattered by everyone who wants a favor.

The God we must learn to know is the Majesty in the heavens, God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, the only wise God, our Saviour.

He it is that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, who stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell.

Who bringeth out His starry host by number and calleth them all by name through the greatness of His power, who seeth the works of man as vanity.

who putteth no confidence in princes and asks no counsel of kings. Knowledge of such a Being cannot be gained by study alone.

It comes by wisdom the natural man knows nothing of, neither can know, because it is spiritually discerned. To know God is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world.

It is easy because the knowledge is not won by hard mental toil, but is something freely given. As sunlight falls free on the open field, the knowledge of the holy God is a gift to men who are open to receive it.

But this knowledge is difficult because there are conditions to be met and the obstinate nature of fallen man does not take kindly to them.

Let me present a summary of these conditions as taught by the Bible and repeated through the centuries by the holiest, sweetest saints the world has ever known: First, we must forsake our sins.

The belief that a holy God cannot be known by men of confirmed evil lives is not new to the Christian religion.

The Hebrew book, The Wisdom of Solomon, which has taught Christianity for many years, has the following passage: “Love righteousness.

ye that be judges of the earth: think of the Lord with a good heart, and in simplicity of heart seek him. For he will be found of than that tempt him not.

And showeth himself unto such as do not distrust him. For forward thoughts separate from God and his power, when it is tried, reproveth the unwise.

For unto a malicious soul, wisdom shall not enter; nor dwell in the body that is subject to sin. For the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee deceit.

And remove from thoughts that are without understanding and will not abide when unrighteousness cometh in.”

This same thought is found in various sayings throughout the inspired Scriptures, the best known probably being the words of Christ, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”

Second, there must be an utter commitment of the whole life to Christ in faith. This is what it means to “believe in Christ.”

It involves a volitional and emotional attachment to Him accompanied by a firm purpose to obey Him in all things.

This requires that we keep His commandments, carry our cross, and love God and our fellow men.

Third, there must be a reckoning of ourselves to have died unto sin and to be alive unto God in Christ Jesus, followed by a throwing open of the entire personality to the inflow of the Holy Spirit.

Then we must practice whatever self-discipline is required to walk in the Spirit and trample under our feet the lusts of the flesh.

Fourth, we must boldly repudiate the cheap values of the fallen world and become completely detached in spirit from everything that unbelieving men set their hearts upon.

Allowing ourselves only the simplest enjoyments of nature which God has bestowed alike upon the just and the unjust.

Fifth, we must practice the art of long and loving meditation upon the majesty of God. This will take some effort, for the concept of majesty has all but disappeared from the human race. The focal point of man’s interest is now himself.

Humanism in its various forms has displaced theology as the key to the understanding of life. When the nineteenth-century poet Swinburne wrote.

“Glory to Man in the highest! for man is the master of things,” he gave to the modern world its new Te Deum.

All this must be reversed by a deliberate act of the will and kept so by a patient effort of the mind.

God is a Person and can be known in increasing degrees of intimate acquaintance as we prepare our hearts for the wonder.

It may be necessary for us to alter our former beliefs about God as the glory that gilds the Sacred Scriptures dawns over our interior lives.

We may also need to break quietly and graciously with the lifeless textualism that prevails among the gospel churches, and to protest the frivolous character of much that passes for Christianity among us.

By this, we may for a time lose friends and gain a passing reputation for being holier-than-thou, but no man who permits.

The expectation of unpleasant consequences to influence him in a matter like this is fit for the kingdom of God.

Sixth, as the knowledge of God becomes more wonderful, greater service to our fellow men will become for us imperative.

This blessed knowledge is not given to be enjoyed selfishly. The more perfectly we know God the more we will feel the desire to translate.

The new-found knowledge into deeds of mercy toward suffering humanity. The God who gave all to us will continue to give all through us as we come to know Him better.

Thus far we have considered the individual’s relation to God but like the ointment of a man’s right hand, which by its fragrance “betrayeth itself”.

Any intensified knowledge of God will soon begin to affect those around us in the Christian community.

And we must seek purposefully to share our increasing light with the fellow members of the household of God.

This we can best do by keeping the majesty of God in full focus in all our public services. Not only our private prayers should be filled with God.

By our witnessing, our singing, our preaching, and our writing should center around the Person of our holy, holy Lord and extol continually the greatness of His dignity and power.

There is a glorified Man on the right hand of the Majesty in heaven faithfully representing us there. We are left for a season among men; let us faithfully represent Him here.

The Self-Sufficiency Of God

Teach us, O God, that nothing is necessary to Thee. Were anything necessary to Thee that thing would be the measure of Thine imperfection: and how could we worship one who is imperfect?

If nothing is necessary to Thee, then no one is necessary, and if no one, then not we. Thou dost seek us though Thou does not need us.

We seek Thee because we need Thee, for in Thee we live and move and have our being. Amen

“The Father hath life in himself,” said our Lord, and it is characteristic of His teaching that He thus in a brief sentence sets forth truth so lofty as to transcend the highest reaches of human thought.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

God, He said, is self-sufficient; He is what He is in Himself, in the final meaning of those words.

Whatever God is, and all that God is, He is in Himself. All life is in and from God, whether it be the lowest form of unconscious life or the highly self-conscious, intelligent life of a seraph.

No creature has life in itself; all life is a gift from God.

An elementary but correct way to think of God is as the One who contains all, who gives all that is given, but who Himself can receive nothing that He has not first given.

To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature’s word and cannot be spoken of by the Creator.

God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself.

His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness, they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself.

Again we must reverse the familiar flow of our thoughts and try to understand that which is unique, that which stands alone as being true in this situation and nowhere else.

Our common habits of thought allow for the existence of need among created things. Nothing is complete in itself but requires something outside itself to exist.

All breathing things need air; every organism needs food and water. Take air and water from the earth and all life would perish instantly.

It may be stated as an axiom that to stay alive every created thing needs some other created thing and all things need God. To God alone nothing is necessary.

The river grows larger by its tributaries, but where is the tributary that can enlarge the One out of whom came everything and to whose infinite fullness all creation owes its being?

Unfathomable Sea: all life is out of Theey
And Thy life is Thy blissful Unity. —Frederick W. Faber

The problem of why God created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself.

As a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.

Since He is the Being supreme over all, it follows that God cannot be elevated. Nothing is above Him, nothing beyond Him.

Any motion in His direction is elevation for the creature; away from Him, descent.

He holds His position out of Himself and by leave of none. As no one can promote Him, so no one can degrade Him. It is written that He upholds all things by the word of His power. How can He be raised or supported by the things He upholds?

Were all human beings suddenly to become blind, still the sun would shine by day and the stars by night, for these owe nothing to the millions who benefit from their light.

So, were every man on earth to become an atheist, it could not affect God in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.

Almighty God, just because He is almighty, needs no support. The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God that is precisely what we see.

Twentieth-century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God.

But the truth is that God is not greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist. That we do exist is altogether of God’s free determination, not by our desert nor by divine necessity.

Probably the hardest thought of all for our natural egotism to entertain is that God does not need our help. We commonly represent Him as busy, and eager.

Somewhat frustrated Father hurrying about seeking help to carry out His benevolent plan to bring peace and salvation to the world, but, as said Lady Julian, “I saw truly that God doeth all-thing, be it never so little.

” The God who worketh all things surely needs no help and no helpers. Too many missionary appeals are based upon this fancied frustration of Almighty God.

An effective speaker can easily excite pity in his listeners, not only for the heathen but for the God who has tried so hard and so long to save them and has failed for want of support.

I fear that thousands of younger persons enter Christian service from no higher motive than to help deliver God from the embarrassing situation His love has gotten Him into and His limited abilities seem unable to get Him out of.

Add to this a certain degree of commendable idealism and a fair amount of compassion for the underprivileged and you have the true drive behind much Christian activity today.

Again, God heeds no defenders. He is the eternal Undefended. To communicate with us in all idioms we can understand, God in the Scriptures makes full use of military terms.

But surely it was never intended that we should think of the throne of the Majesty on high as being under siege, with Michael and his hosts or some other heavenly beings defending it from stormy overthrow.

So to think is to misunderstand everything the Bible would tell us about God. Neither Judaism nor Christianity could approve of such puerile notions.

A God who must be defended can help us only while someone is helping Him. We may count upon Him only if He wins in the cosmic seesaw battle between right and wrong.

Such a God could not command the respect of intelligent men; He could only excite their pity.

To be right we must think worthy of God. It is morally imperative that we purge from our minds all ignoble concepts of the Deity and let Him be the God in our minds that He is in His universe.

The Christian religion has to do with God and man, but its focal point is God, not man. Man’s only claim to importance is that he was created in the divine image; in himself he is nothing.

The psalmists and prophets of the Scriptures refer sad scorn to a weak man whose breath is in his nostrils, who grows up like the grass in the morning only to be cut down and wither before the setting of the sun.

That God exists for himself and man for the glory of God is the emphatic teaching of the Bible. The high honor of God is first in heaven as it must yet be on earth.

From all this, we may begin to understand why the Holy Scriptures have so much to say about the vital place of faith and why they brand unbelief as a deadly sin. Among all created beings, not one dared trust it.

God alone trusts in Himself; all other beings must trust in Him. Unbelief is perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living God but in dying men.

The unbeliever denies the self-sufficiency of God and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors God and ultimately destroys the soul of the man.

In His love and pity, God came to us as Christ. This has been the consistent position of the Church from the days of the apostles. It is fixed for Christian belief in the doctrine of the incarnation of the Eternal Son.

In recent times, however, this has come to mean something different from, and less than, what it meant to the early church. The Man Jesus as He appeared in the flesh has been equated with the Godhead and all His human weaknesses and limitations are attributed to the Deity.

The truth is that the Man who walked among us was a demonstration, not of an unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of the Godhead was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of Human nature to protect mankind.

“Go down,” God told Moses on the mountain, “charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish”; and later, “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” Christians today appear to know Christ only after the flesh.

They try to achieve communion with Him by divesting Him of His burning holiness and unapproachable majesty, the very attributes He veiled while on earth but assumed in fullness of glory upon His ascension to the Father’s right hand.

The Christ of popular Christianity has a weak smile and a halo. He has become Someone-up-There who likes people, at least some people.

And are grateful but not too impressed. If they need Him, He also needs them. Let us not imagine that the truth of divine self-sufficiency will paralyze Christian activity.

Rather it will stimulate all holy endeavors. This truth, while a needed rebuke to human self-confidence, will when viewed from its Biblical perspective lift from our minds.

The exhausting load of mortality encourages us to take the easy yoke of Christ and spend ourselves in Spirit-inspired toil for the honor of God and the good of mankind.

For the blessed news is that the God who needs no one has in sovereign condescension set Himself to work by and in and through His obedient children.

If all this appears self-contradictory – Amen, be it so. The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known.

Then truth which now appears to conflict with itself will arise in shining unity and it will be seen that the conflict has not been in the truth but in our sin-damaged minds.

In the meanwhile our inner fulfillment lies in loving obedience to the commandments of Christ and the inspired admonitions of His apostles.

“It is God which worketh in you.” He needs no one, but when faith is present He works through anyone. Two statements are in this sentence and a healthy spiritual life requires that we accept both.

For a full generation, the first has been in almost total eclipse, and that is to our deep spiritual injury.

Fountain of good, all blessing flows From Thee; no want Thy fulness knows; What but Thyself canst Thou desire?

Yet, self-sufficient as Thou art,
Thou dost desire my worthless heart.
This, only this, dost Thou require. —Johann Scheffler

A Divine Attribute Something True About God

Majesty is unspeakable, my soul desires to behold Thee. I cry to Thee from the dust. Yet when I inquire after Thy name it is secret.

Thou art hidden in the light which no man can approach unto. What Thou art cannot be thought or uttered, for Thy glory is ineffable.

Still, prophet and psalmist, apostle, and saint have encouraged me to believe that I may in some measure know Thee.

For with Thee shall I live when the stars of the twilight are no more and the heavens have vanished away and only Thou remainest. Amen.

The study of the attributes of God, far from being dull and heavy, may for the enlightened Christian be a sweet and absorbing spiritual exercise. To the soul that is a thirst for God, nothing could be more delightful.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

Only to sit and think of God,
Oh, what a joy it is!
To think the thought,
to breathe the Name
Earth has no higher bliss. —Frederick W. Faber

It would seem to be necessary before proceeding further to define the word attribute as it is used in this volume. It is not used in its philosophical sense nor confined to its strictest theological meaning.

By it, it means simply whatever may be correctly ascribed to God. For this book, an attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself.

And this brings us to the question of the number of the divine attributes. Religious thinkers have differed about this. Some have insisted that there are seven, but Faber sang of the “God of a thousand attributes,” and Charles Wesley exclaimed,

Glory thine attributes confess,
Glorious all and numberless.

True, these men were worshiping, not counting; but we might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasonings of the theological mind.

If an attribute is something true of God, we may as well not try to enumerate them. Furthermore, in this meditation on the being of God, the number of the attributes is not important, for only a limited few will be mentioned here.

If an attribute is something true of God, it is also something that we can conceive as being true of Him. God, being infinite, must possess attributes about which we can know.

An attribute, as we know it, is a mental concept, an intellectual response to God’s self-revelation.

It is an answer to a question, the reply God makes to our interrogation concerning himself.

What is God like? What kind of God is He? How may we expect Him to act toward us and all created things? Such questions are not merely academic.

They touch the far-in reaches of the human spirit, and their answers affect life character, and destiny. When asked in ‘reverence and their answers sought in humility, these are questions that cannot but be pleasing to our Father who art in heaven. “

For He willeth that we are occupied in knowing and loving,” wrote Julian of Norwich, “till the time that we shall be fulfilled in heaven…

For of all things the beholding and the loving of the Maker maketh the soul to seem less in his sight, and most filleth him with reverent dread and true meekness; with plenty of charity for his fellow Christians.

“To our questions, God has provided answers; not all the answers, certainly, but enough to satisfy our intellects and ravish our hearts. These answers He has provided in nature, in the Scriptures, and the person of His Son.

The idea that God reveals Himself in the creation is not held with much vigor by modern Christians; but it is, nevertheless, outlined in the inspired Word.

Especially in the writings of David and Isaiah in the Old Testament and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in the New. In the Holy Scriptures, the revelation is clearer:

The heavens declare Thy glory, Lord,
In every star, Thy wisdom shines;
But when our eyes behold Thy Word,
We read Thy name in fairer lines. —Isaac Watts

And it is a sacred and indispensable part of the Christian message that the full sun-blaze of revelation came at the incarnation when the Eternal Word became flesh to dwell among us.

Though God in this threefold revelation has provided answers to our questions concerning Him, the answers by no means lie on the surface.

They must be sought by prayer, by long meditation on the written Word, and by earnest and well-disciplined labor. However brightly the light may shine, it can be seen only by those who are spiritually prepared to receive it.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

If we think accurately about the attributes of God, we must learn to reject certain words that are sure to come crowding into our minds – such words as trait, characteristic, and quality.

Words are proper and necessary when we are considering created beings but altogether inappropriate when we are thinking about God. We must break ourselves from the habit of thinking of the Creator as we think of His creatures.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts.

Words, which are given to us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

“As nothing is more easy than to think,” says Thomas Traherne, “so nothing is more difficult than to think well.” If we ever think well it should be when we think of God. A man is the sum of his parts and his character is the sum of the traits that compose it.

These traits vary from man to man and may from time to time vary from within the same man. Human character is not constant because the traits or qualities that constitute it are unstable.

These come and go, burn low, or glow with great intensity throughout our lives. Thus a man who is kind and considerate at thirty may be cruel and churlish at fifty.

Such a change is possible because man is made; he is a composition; he is the sum of the traits that make up his character.

We naturally and correctly think of man as a work wrought by the divine Intelligence. He is both created and made. How he was created lies undisclosed among the secrets of God.

How he was brought from no-being to being, from nothing to something is not known and may never be known to any but the One who brought him forth.

How God made him, however, is less of a secret, and while we know only a small portion of the whole truth, we do know that man possesses a body, a soul, and a spirit.

We know that he has memory, reason, will, intelligence, and sensation, and we know that to give these meaning he has the wondrous gift of consciousness.

We know, too, that these, together with various qualities of temperament, compose his total human self.

These are gifts from God arranged by infinite wisdom, notes that make up the score of creations’ loftiest symphony, and threads that compose the master tapestry of the universe.

But in all this, we are thinking creature thoughts and using creature words to express them. Neither such thoughts nor such words are appropriate to the Deity.

“The Father is made of none,” says the Atha- Asian Creed, “neither created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten.

The Holy Spirit is of the Father and the Son: not made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding. ” God exists in Himself and of Himself. His being He owes to no one. His substance is indivisible. He has no parts but is single in His unitary being.

The doctrine of divine unity means not only that there is but one God; it means also that God is simple, uncomplex, one with Himself. The harmony of His being is the result not of a perfect balance of parts but of the absence of parts.

Between His attributes, no contradiction can exist. He need not suspend one to exercise another, for in Him all His attributes are one. All of God does all that God does; He does not divide himself to perform work but works in the total unity of His being.

An attribute, then, is a part of God. It is how God is, and as far as the reasoning mind can go, we may say that it is what God is, though, as I have tried to explain, exactly what He is He cannot tell us.

Of what God is conscious when He is conscious of self, only He knows. “The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.”

Only to an equal could God communicate the mystery of His Godhead; and to think of God as having an equal is to fall into an intellectual absurdity.

The divine attributes are what we know to be true of God. He does not possess them as qualities; they are how God is as He reveals Himself to His creatures.

Love, for instance, is not something God has and which may grow or diminish or cease to be. His love is the way God is, and when He loves He is simply being Himself. And so with the other attributes.

One God! One Majesty!
There is no God but Thee!
Unbounded unextended Unity!
Unfathomable Sea!
All life is out of Thee,
and Thy life is Thy blissful Unity —Frederick W Faber

God Incomprehensible

Were we to hold our peace the stones would cry out; yet if we speak, what shall we say? Teach us to know that we cannot know, for the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

Let faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not so that we may believe In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question: “What is God like?” This book is an attempt to answer that question.

Yet at the outset, I must acknowledge that it cannot be answered except to say that God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

We learn by using what we already know as a bridge over which we pass to the unknown. The mind can’t crash suddenly past the familiar into the unfamiliar.

Even the most vigorous and daring mind is unable to create something out of nothing by a spontaneous act of imagination. Those strange beings that populate the world of mythology and superstition are not pure creations of fancy.

The imagination created them by taking the ordinary inhabitants of earth and air and sea and extending their familiar forms beyond their normal boundaries, or by mixing the forms of two or more so as to produce something new.

However beautiful or grotesque these may be, their prototypes can always be identified. They are like something we already know.

The effort of inspired men to express the ineffable has placed a great strain upon both thought and language in the Holy Scriptures.

These being often a revelation of a world above nature, and the minds for which they were written being a part of nature, the writers are compelled to use a great many “like” words to make themselves understood.

When the Spirit acquaints us with something that lies beyond the field of our knowledge, He tells us that this thing is like something we already know, but He is always careful to phrase His description to save us from slavish literalism.

For example, when the prophet Ezekiel saw heaven opened” and beheld visions of God, he found himself looking at that which he had no language to describe.

What he was seeing was wholly different from anything he had ever known before, so he fell back upon the language of resemblance.

“As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire.” The nearer he approaches the burning throne the less sure his words become:

“And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it.

And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it… This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

Strange as this language is, it still does not create the impression of unreality. One gathers that the whole scene is very real but entirely alien to anything men know on earth.

So, to convey an idea of what he sees, the prophet must employ such words as “likeness,” “appearance,” “as it were,” and “the likeness of the appearance.”

Even the throne becomes “the appearance of a throne” and He that sits upon it, though like a man, is so unlike one that He can be described only as “the likeness of the appearance of a man.”

When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we dare not add to that statement an idea from our head and make it mean “in the exact image.”

To do so is to make man a replica of God, and that is to lose the unicity of God and end with no God at all. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is-God from that-which-is-not-God.

To think of creature and Creator as alike in essential being is to rob God of most of His attributes and reduce Him to the status of a creature.

It is, for instance, to rob Him of His infinitude: there cannot be two unlimited substances in the universe. It is to take away His sovereignty: there cannot be two free beings in the universe, for sooner or later two completely free wills must collide.

These attributes, to mention no more, require that there be but one to whom they belong. When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds to work on.

Hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God.

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

“The intellect knoweth that it is ignorant of Thee,” said Nicholas of Cusa, “because it knoweth Thou canst not be known, unless the unknowable could be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible attained.”

“If anyone should set forth any concept by which Thou canst be conceived,” says Nicholas again, “I know that that concept is not a concept of Thee, for every concept is ended in the wall of Paradise…

So too, if any were to tell of the understanding of Thee, wishing to supply a means whereby Thou mightest be understood, this man is yet far from Thee… forasmuch as Thou art absolute above all the concepts which any man can frame.”

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control.

We need the feeling of security that comes from knowing what God is like, and what He is like is of course a composite of all the religious pictures we have seen, all the best people we have known or heard about, and all the sublime ideas we have entertained.

If all this sounds strange to modern ears, it is only because we have for a full half-century taken God for granted. The glory of God has not been revealed to this generation of men.

The God of contemporary Christianity is only slightly superior to the gods of Greece and Rome if indeed He is not inferior to them in that He is weak and helpless while they at least have power.

If what we conceive God to be He is not, how then shall we think of Him? If He is indeed incomprehensible, as the Creed declares Him to be, and unapproachable, as Paul says He is, how can we Christians satisfy our longing after Him?

The hopeful words, “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace,” still stand after the passing of the centuries.

But how shall We acquaint ourselves with One who eludes all the straining efforts of mind and heart? And how shall we be held accountable to know what cannot be known?

“Canst thou by searching find out God?” asks Zophar the Naamathite; “canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?”

“Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son,” said our Lord, “and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

” The Gospel according to John reveals the helplessness of the human mind before the great Mystery which is God, and Paul in First Corinthians teaches that God can be known only as the Holy Spirit performs in the seeking heart an act of self-disclosure.

The yearning to know What cannot be known, to comprehend the Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image of God like man.

Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source. How can this be realized?

The answer of the Bible is simply “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows Himself not to reason but to faith and love.

Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love is an organ of experience. God came to us in the incarnation; in atonement, He reconciled us to Himself, and by faith and love we enter and lay hold on Him.

“Verily God is of infinite greatness,” says Christ’s enraptured troubadour, Richard Rolle; “more than we can think;… unknowable by created things; and can never be comprehended by us as He is in Himself.

But even here and now, whenever the heart begins to burn with a desire for God, she is made able to receive the uncreated light, and, inspired and fulfilled by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, she tastes the joys of heaven.

She transcends all visible things and is raised to the sweetness of eternal life… Herein truly is perfect love; when all the intent of the mind, all the secret working of the heart is lifted into the love of God.”’

That God can be known by the soul in tender personal experience while remaining infinitely aloof from the curious eyes of reason constitutes a paradox best described as

Darkness to the intellect
But sunshine to the heart. —Frederick W. Faber

The author of the celebrated little work The Cloud of Unknowing develops this thesis throughout his book. In approaching God, he says.

The seeker discovers that the divine Being dwells in obscurity, hidden behind a cloud of unknowing; nevertheless, he should not be discouraged but set his will with a naked intent unto God.

This cloud is between the seeker and God so that he may never see God clearly by the light of understanding nor feel Him in the emotions.

But by the mercy of God faith can break through into His Presence if the seeker believes the Word and presses on. Michael de Molinos, the Spanish saint, taught the same thing.

In his Spiritual Guide he says that God will take the soul by the hand and lead her through the way of pure faith, “causing the understanding to leave behind all considerations and reasonings.

He draws her forward… Thus He causes her using a simple and obscure knowledge of faith to aspire only to her Bridegroom upon the wings of love.”

For these and similar teachings Molinos was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition and sentenced to life imprisonment. He soon died in prison, but the truth he taught can never die.

Speaking of the Christian soul he says: “Let her suppose that all the whole world and the most refined conceptions of the wisest intellects can tell her nothing.

And that the goodness and beauty of her Beloved infinitely surpass all their knowledge, being persuaded that all creatures are too rude to inform her and to conduct her to the true knowledge of God…

She ought then to go forward with her love, leaving all her understanding behind. Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him.”

“What is God like?” If by that question we mean “What is God like in Himselfi” there is no answer. If we mean “What has God disclosed about Himself that the reverent reason can comprehend?” there is, I believe, an answer both full and satisfying.

For while the name of God is secret and His essential nature incomprehensible, He in condescending love has by revelation declared certain things to be true of Himself. These we call His attributes.

Sovereign Father heavenly King
Thee we now presume to sing;
Glad thine attributes confess
Glorious all, and numberless.