Chapter IX — Faith in the Earnest God

Daily Readings

Throughout our studies we have been thinking of the effect of faith on the one who exercises it. As an introduction to this week's thought on the earnestness of God, let us approach the effect of faith from another angle. Faith has enormous influence on the one in whom it is reposed; not only the believer but the one in whom they believe is affected by their faith.

Ninth Week, First Day

I commend to you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the church in Cenchrea, that you may receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and assist her in whatever business she has need of you; for indeed she has been a helper of many and of myself also. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their own necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. Likewise greet the church that is in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who is the firstfruits of Achaia to Christ. Greet Mary, who labored much for us. Greet Andronicus and Junia, my countrymen and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me. Greet Amplias, my beloved in the Lord. —Romans 16:1–8 (NKJV)

This series of personal commendations is only the beginning of the last chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans. All the way through one hears the individual names of Paul's friends and fellow-laborers, with his discriminating and hearty praise of each. It is clear that he has faith in these men and women; he believes in them and relies on them. Consider the effect on them that Paul's confidence in their Christian fidelity would naturally have. There is no motive much more stirring than the consciousness that somebody believes in us, is trusting and counting on us. Whatever is fine and noble in human life responds to that appeal. Soldiers who feel that their country is relying upon their fidelity, children who are conscious that their parents believe in them, friends who are heartened by the assurance that some folk completely trust them — how much of the best in all of us has come because we have been the objects of somebody's faith! A Connecticut volunteer in the American Revolution has written that George Washington once paused for a moment in front of his company and said simply, "I am counting on you men from Connecticut." And the recruit clasped his musket in his arms and wept with the devotion which Washington's confidence evoked. Would not the sixteenth chapter of Romans have a similar effect on those who read it?

O loving and tender Father in heaven, we confess before You, in sorrow, how hard and unsympathetic are our hearts; how often we have sinned against our neighbors by want of compassion and tenderness; how often we have felt no true pity for their trials and sorrows, and have neglected to comfort, help, and visit them. O Father, forgive this our sin, and lay it not to our charge. Give us grace ever to alleviate the crosses and difficulties of those around us, and never to add to them; teach us to be consolers in sorrow, to take thought for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan; let our charity show itself not in words only, but in deed and truth. Teach us to judge as You do, with forbearance, with much pity and indulgence; and help us to avoid all unloving judgment of others; for the sake of Jesus Christ Your Son, who loved us and gave Himself for us. Amen. —Johann Arndt, 1555.

Ninth Week, Second Day

Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, He called His disciples to Himself; and from them He chose twelve whom He also named apostles: Simon, whom He also named Peter, and Andrew his brother; James and John; Philip and Bartholomew; Matthew and Thomas; James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon called the Zealot; Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot who also became a traitor. —Luke 6:12–16 (NKJV)

The power that comes to people when someone believes in them must have come to these disciples whom Jesus trusted with His work. We often note the power that was theirs through their faith in Christ; consider today the inspiration that came from Christ's faith in them. He picked them out, commissioned them, relied on them, and believed in their ability with God's help to carry His work to a successful outcome. All that is most distinctive and memorable in their character came from their response to that divine trust. How they must have encouraged themselves in times of failure and disheartenment by saying: He believes in us; even though we are ignorant and sinful, He believes in us; He has trusted His work to us, and for all our inability He has faith that we can carry it to triumph! Their faith in themselves and what they could do with God's help must have been almost altogether a reflex of His faith in them. Our contention, therefore, that faith is the dynamic of life has now a new confirmation: the faith that lifts and motivates life is not simply our faith in the Divine, but the faith of the Divine in us. One of the most glorious results of believing in God is that we can press on to the further confidence that God believes in us. If He did not, He would never have made us. The very fact that we are here means that He does believe in us, in our possibilities of growth, in our capacities of service, in what He can do in and for and through us before He is done. Our faith in God and God's faith in us together make an unequalled motive for great living. Yet there is always a sad appendix to every list of trusted people, with somebody's blighted name: "Judas Iscariot who also became a traitor."

Loving Father, our hearts are moved to gratitude and trust when we look up to You. We rejoice that through our fleeting days there runs Your gracious purpose. We praise You that we are not the creatures of chance, nor the victims of iron fate, but that out from You we have come and into Your heart we shall return. We would not, even if we could, escape You. You alone are good, and to escape from You is to fall into infinite evil. Your hand is upon us moving us on to some far-off spiritual event, where the meaning and the mystery of life shall be made plain and Your glory shall be revealed. Look in pity upon our ignorance and childishness. Forgive us our small understanding of Your purpose of good concerning us. Be not angry with us, but draw us from the things of this world which cannot satisfy our foolish hearts. Fill us with Yourself, that we may no longer be a burden to ourselves. So glorify the face of goodness that evil shall have no more dominion over us. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Ninth Week, Third Day

The fact that God has faith in us is not alone a source of comfort; it presents a stirring challenge. It means that He is in earnest about achieving His great purposes in human life and that He is counting upon us to help. He has set His heart on aims, about which He cares, and to whose achievement He is calling us; He is confident that with Him we can work out, if we will, loftier character and a better world. Let us consider some of the purposes which God is counting on us, in fellowship with Him, to achieve. The prophet Micah, in a brief but perfect drama, gives one clue. First the Lord summons His people to a trial, with the eternal mountains for judges:

"Hear now what the Lord says: 'Arise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, O you mountains, the Lord's complaint, and you strong foundations of the earth; for the Lord has a complaint against His people, and He will contend with Israel.'" —Micah 6:1–2 (NKJV)

Then, the Lord presents His case:

"O My people, what have I done to you? And how have I wearied you? Testify against Me. For I brought you up from the land of Egypt, I redeemed you from the house of bondage; and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. O My people, remember now what Balak king of Moab counseled, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him, from Acacia Grove to Gilgal, that you may know the righteousness of the Lord." —Micah 6:3–5 (NKJV)

Then the people put in their hesitant, questioning plea.

With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? —Micah 6:6–7 (NKJV)

Then the mountains pronounce judgment:

He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? —Micah 6:8 (NKJV)

God, then, is in earnest about just, kind, and humble character. He believes in it as a possibility; He sees the making of it now in human hearts; He is pledged to further and establish it with all His power; and He is counting on us for loyal cooperation with all our powers of choice. Vital faith means a transforming partnership with a God who is in earnest about character.

O You who are the Father of that Son who has awakened us and yet urges us out of the sleep of our sins, and exhorts us that we become Yours, to You, Lord, we pray, who are the supreme Truth, for all truth that is, is from You. You we implore, O Lord, who are the highest Wisdom, through You are wise, all those that are so. You are the supreme Joy, and from You all have become happy that are so. You are the highest Good and from You all beauty springs. You are the intellectual Light, and from You we derive our understanding. To You, O God, we call and speak. Hear us, O Lord, for You are our God and our Lord, our Father and our Creator, our Ruler and our Hope, our Wealth and our Honor, our Home, our Country, our Salvation, and our Life; hear, hear us, O Lord. Few of Your servants comprehend You, but at least we love You — yes, love You above all other things. We seek You, we follow You, we are ready to serve You; under Your power we desire to abide, for You are the Sovereign of all. We pray You to command us as You will; through Jesus Christ Your Son our Lord. Amen. —King Alfred, 849.

Ninth Week, Fourth Day

God also is in earnest about social righteousness.

"I hate, I despise your feast days, and I do not savor your sacred assemblies. Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them, nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings. Take away from Me the noise of your songs, for I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments. But let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream." —Amos 5:21–24 (NKJV)

Anyone who cares about character must care about social conditions, for every unfair economic situation, every social evil left to run its course means ruin to character. And the God of the Bible, because He cares supremely for personal life at its best, is zealously in earnest about social justice; His prophets blazed with indignation at all inequity, and His Son made the coming Kingdom, when God's will would be done on earth, the center of His message. To fellowship with this earnest purpose of God we all are summoned; God believes in the glorious possibilities of life on earth; He is counting on us to put away the sins that hold the Kingdom back and to fight the abuses that crush character. To believe in God, therefore — the God who is fighting His way with His children up through ignorance, brutality, and selfishness to "new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13 NKJV) — is no weakly comfortable blessing. It means joining a moral war; it means devotion, sacrifice; its spirit is the Cross and its motive an undiscourageable faith. And our underlying assurance that this war for a better world can be won is not simply our belief that it can be done, but our faith that God is, and that He believes that it can be done. When we pray we say, "Your Kingdom come," and we are full of hope about the long, sacrificial struggle, for the purpose behind and through it all is first of all God's. Our earnestness is but an echo of His.

O Eternal One, we adore You who in all ages have been the great companion and teacher of humankind; for You have lifted our race from the depths, and have made us to share in Your conscious intelligence and Your will that makes for righteousness and love. You alone are our Redeemer, for Your lifting arms were about us and Your persistent voice was in our hearts as we slowly climbed up from savage darkness and cruelty. You know how often we have resisted You and loved the easy ways of sin rather than the toilsome gain of self-control and the divine irritation of Your truth....

We pray for those who amid all the knowledge of our day are still without knowledge; for those who hear not the sighs of the children that toil, nor the sobs of such as are wounded because others have made haste to be rich; for those who have never felt the hot tears of the mothers of the poor that struggle vainly against poverty and vice. Arouse them, we ask You, from their selfish comfort and grant them the grace of social repentance. Smite us all with the conviction that for us ignorance is sin, and that we are indeed our brother's keeper if our own hand has helped to lay them low. Though increase of knowledge bring increase of sorrow, may we turn without flinching to the light and offer ourselves as instruments of Your spirit in bringing order and beauty out of disorder and darkness. Amen. —Walter Rauschenbusch.

Ninth Week, Fifth Day

The thought which we have been pursuing leads us to a truth of major importance: if God is thus in earnest, believing in our possibilities and laboring for them, then He cannot be known by anyone who does not share His purpose and His labor. Action is a road to knowledge and some things never can be known without it. If one would know the business world, one must be an active business person; no amount of abstract study and speculation can take the place of vital participation in business struggle. The way to understand any movement or enterprise is to go into it, share its enthusiasms and hopes, labor sacrificially for its success, bear its defeats as though they were our own, and rejoice in its achievements as though nothing so much mattered to our happiness. Such knowledge is thorough and vital; when one who so has learned what war is, or the missionary enterprise, or the fight against injustice, stands up to speak, a merely theoretical student of these movements sounds unreal and tame. If therefore God is earnest Purpose, with aims in which He calls us to share, no one can thoroughly know Him merely by thinking; one must know Him by acting.

"But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God." —John 3:21 (NKJV)

Jesus answered them and said, "My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority." —John 7:16–17 (NKJV)

Many people endeavor to reach a satisfactory knowledge of God by clarifying their thought and working out a rational philosophy. But, by such intellectual means alone, they could not gain satisfactory knowledge of so familiar a thing as home life. To know home life one elemental act is essential: get into a home and share its problems, its satisfactions, and its hopes. So the most adequate philosophy by itself can bring no satisfactory knowledge of God; only by working with God, sharing His purposes for the world, sacrificially laboring for the aims He has at heart can we know Him.

Eternal God, who has formed us, and designed us for companionship with You; who has called us to walk with You and be not afraid; forgive us, we pray, if craven fear, unworthy thought, or hidden sin has prompted us to hide from You. Remove the suspicion which regards Your service as an intrusion on our time and an interference with our daily task. Show to us the life that serves You in the quiet discharge of each day's duty, that ennobles all our toil by doing it as unto You. We ask for no far-off vision which shall set us dreaming while opportunities around slip by; for no enchantment which shall make our hands to slack and our spirits to sleep, but for the vision of Yourself in common things for every day; that we may find a Divine calling in the claims of life, and see a heavenly reward in work well done. We ask You not to lift us out of life, but to prove Your power within it; not for tasks more suited to our strength, but for strength more suited to our tasks. Give to us the vision that moves, the strength that endures, the grace of Jesus Christ, who wore our flesh like a monarch's robe and walked our earthly life like a conqueror in triumph. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Ninth Week, Sixth Day

Because action with God is essential to any satisfying knowledge of Him, action is one of the great resolvers of doubt. Many minds, endeavoring to think through the mystifying problems of God's providence, find themselves in a clueless labyrinth. The more they think the more entangled and confused their minds become. Their thoughts strike a fatal circle, like wanderers lost in the woods, and return upon their course, baffled and disheartened. To such perplexed minds the best advice often is: Cease your futile thinking and go to work. Let action take the place of speculation. Break the fatal round of circular thought that never will arrive, and go out to act on the basis of what little you do believe. Your mind like a dammed stream is growing stagnant; set it running to some useful purpose, if only to turn mill-wheels, and trust that activity will bring it cleansing in due time. Horace Bushnell, the great preacher, while a skeptical tutor at Yale, was disturbed because so many students were unsettled by his disbelief. In the midst of a revival he said that like a great snag he caught and stopped the newly launched boats as fast as they came down. Unable to think his way out of his intellectual perplexity, he faced one night this arresting question: "What is the use of my trying to get further knowledge, so long as I do not cheerfully yield to what I already know?" And kneeling he prayed after this fashion: "O God, I believe there is an eternal difference between right and wrong, and I hereby give myself up to do the right and to refrain from the wrong. I believe that You exist, and if You can hear my cry and will reveal Yourself to me, I pledge myself to do Your will, and I make this pledge fully, freely, and forever." What wonder that in time the light broke and that Bushnell became a great prophet of the faith!

Even Paul, finishing his laborious discussion of God's providence toward Israel, acknowledges his baffled thought:

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! "For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become His counselor?" "Or who has first given to Him and it shall be repaid to him?" For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen. —Romans 11:33–36 (NKJV)

And then, as if he turned from philosophy to action with gratitude, he begins the twelfth chapter:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. —Romans 12:1–2 (NKJV)

O God, we thank You for the sweet refreshment of sleep and for the glory and vigor of the new day. As we set our faces once more toward our daily work, we pray for the strength sufficient for our tasks. May Christ's spirit of duty and service ennoble all we do. Uphold us by the consciousness that our work is useful work and a blessing to all. If there has been anything in our work harmful to others and dishonorable to ourselves, reveal it to our inner eye with such clearness that we shall hate it and put it away, though it be at a loss to ourselves. When we work with others, help us to regard them, not as servants to our will, but as equals in human dignity, and equally worthy of their full reward. May there be nothing in this day's work of which we shall be ashamed when the sun has set, nor in the eventide of our life when our task is done and we go to our long home to meet Your face. Amen. —Walter Rauschenbusch.

Ninth Week, Seventh Day

"Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.' Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' And the King will answer and say to them, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'" —Matthew 25:34–40 (NKJV)

The earnestness of God is not about any diffuse generality; it is about persons. His purposes concern them, and He believes in them and in their capacities for fellowship with Him, for growing character and for glorious destiny. If, therefore, one wishes the sense of God's reality which comes from active co-partnership, let them serve persons, believe in them, and be in earnest about them. A woman, troubled by invincible doubts, was given by a wise minister the Gospel of John and a calling-list of needy families, and was told to use them both. She came through into a luminous faith, and which helped her more, her reading or her service, she could never tell. When the Master said that the good we did to the least of His brethren, we did to Him, He indicated a road to vital knowledge of Him; He said in effect that we can always find Him in the lives of people to whom we give love and help. Many will never find Him at all unless they find Him there. The great believers have been the great servants; and the reason for this is not simply that faith produced service, but also that service produced faith. The life of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, for example, makes convincingly plain that his faith sent him to Labrador for service, and that then he drew out of service a compound interest on his original investment of faith.

O God, the Father of the forsaken, the Help of the weak, the Supplier of the needy, who has diffused and proportioned Your gifts to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform the joyous duty of mutual service; who teaches us that love towards the race of humanity is the bond of perfectness, and the imitation of Your blessed Self; open our eyes and touch our hearts, that we may see and do, both for this world and for that which is to come, the things which belong to our peace. Strengthen us in the work we have undertaken; give us counsel and wisdom, perseverance, faith, and zeal, and in Your own good time, and according to Your pleasure, prosper the outcome. Pour into us a spirit of humility; let nothing be done but in devout obedience to Your will, thankfulness for Your unspeakable mercies, and love to Your adorable Son Christ Jesus.... Amen. —Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801.

Comment for the Week

I

Throughout our studies we have been asserting that faith in God involves confidence that creation has a purpose. But we shall not see the breadth and depth of the affirmation, or its significant meaning for our lives, unless more carefully we face a question, which, as keenly as any other, pierces to the marrow of religion: Is God in earnest?

That the God of the Bible is in earnest is plain. If we open the Book at the Exodus, we hear Him saying, "I have surely seen the oppression of My people ... and have heard their cry ... and I have come down to deliver them" (Exodus 3:7–8 NKJV). If we turn to the prophets, we find Hosea, interpreting the beating of God's heart: "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? ... My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred"¹ (Hosea 11:8 NKJV). Everywhere in the Old Testament, God is in earnest: about personal character — "What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8 NKJV); about social righteousness — "Let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream" (Amos 5:24 NKJV); about the salvation of the world — "It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, that You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 49:6 NKJV). When from the Old Testament one turns to the New, one faces an assertion of God's earnestness that cannot be surpassed: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son" (John 3:16 NKJV). God in the New Testament is as much in earnest as that, and all the major affirmations of the Book cluster about the magnetism of this central faith. God is even like a shepherd with a hundred sheep, who having lost one, leaves the ninety-nine and goes after that which is lost, until he finds it (Luke 15:4). From the earliest Hebrew seer dimly perceiving Him, to the last apostle of the New Covenant, the God of the Bible is tremendously in earnest.

How profoundly the acceptance of this faith deepens the meaning and value of life is evident. For a moment some might think that the major question is not whether God is in earnest but whether we are; but when we consider the hidden fountains from which the streams of our human earnestness must flow, we see how necessary is at least the hope that at the heart of it creation is in earnest too. Von Hartmann, the pessimist, makes one of his characters say, "The activities of the busy world are only the shudderings of a fever." How shall we be seriously in earnest about great causes in a world like that? The people whose devoted lives have made history great have seen in creation's busyness more than aimless shuddering. Moses was in earnest, but behind his consecration was his vision of the Eternal, saying to Pharaoh, "Let my people go!" The Master was in earnest, but with a motive that took into its account the purposefulness of God, "My Father has been working until now, and I have been working" (John 5:17 NKJV).

Indeed, no satisfying meaning, no real unity are conceivable in a purposeless universe. The plain fact is that within the universe nobody explains anything without the statement of its purpose. A chair is something to sit down on; a watch is something to tell time by; a lamp is something to give illumination in the dark — and lacking this purposive description, the story of the precedent history of none of these things, from their original materials to their present shape, would in the least tell what they really are. One who knows all else about a telephone, practically knows nothing, unless aware of what it is for. Nor is the necessity of such explanation lessened when scientists endeavor descriptions in their special realms. Huxley, narrating the growth of a salamander's egg, writes, "Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and so purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column and molded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into the due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skillful manipulation to perfect his work." The obvious fact is that salamanders' eggs act as though they were seriously intent on making salamanders; and lion's cells as though they were tremendously in earnest about making lions. As Herbert Spencer said of a begonia leaf, "We have therefore no alternative but to say, that the living particles composing one of these fragments, have an innate tendency to arrange themselves into the shape of the organism to which they belong." But if this is so, purpose is essential in the description of every living thing. All about us is a world of life with something strikingly like purposeful action rampant everywhere, so that in describing an elm tree it will not do to say only that forces from behind pushed it into being; one must say, too, that from our first observation of its cells they acted as though they were intent on making nothing else but elm. They went about their business as though they had a purpose. The tree's cause is not alone the forces from behind; it is as well the aim that in the cells' action lay ahead.

We can describe nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath without the use of purposive terminology. How shall we try otherwise to describe the universe? A world in which the minutest particles and cells all act as though they were eagerly intent on achieving aims, can only with difficulty be thought of as an aimless whole. Our conviction is insistent and imperious that creation, so surcharged with purposes, must have Purpose. The greatest scientists themselves are often our best witnesses here. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are the twin discoverers of evolution. Said the former: "If we consider the whole universe the mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of chance." Said the latter: the world is "a manifestation of creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose."

What such people have coldly said, the people of devout religion have set on fire with passionate faith. They have been sure that this world is not

In every cause that makes for our salvation they have seen the manifest unveiling of divine intent. God is in earnest — this conviction has possessed them utterly, and to live and die for those things on behalf of which the Eternal is tremendously concerned has been the aim, the motive, and the glory of their lives.

II

One need only watch with casual observance the multitudes who say that they believe in God, to see how few of them believe in this God who is in earnest. When they confess their faith in deity they have something else in mind beside the God of the Bible, compassionately purposeful about His world and calling us to be His fellow-workers. Let us therefore consider some of the fallacies that enable people to believe in a God who is not in earnest.

For one thing, some put God far away. Missionaries in Africa's interior find tribes worshiping stocks, stones, demons, ghosts, but this does not mean that no idea of a great original god is theirs. Often they are not strangers to that thought, but, as an old African woman said, "He never concerned himself with me; why should I concern myself with him?" To such folk a great god exists, but he does not care; he dwells apart, an indifferent deity, who has left this world in the hands of lesser gods that really count. The task of the missionary, therefore, is not to prove the existence of a creator — "No rain, no mushrooms," said an African chief; "no God, no world" — but it is to persuade people that the God who seems so far away is near at hand, that He really cares, and over each soul and all His world is sacrificially in earnest.

Such missionary work is not yet needless among Christian people. Said a Copenhagen preacher in a funeral discourse, "God cannot help us in our great sorrow, because he is so infinitely far away; we must therefore look to Jesus." One feels this Siberian exile of God from all vital meaning for our humanity, when He is called the "Absolute," the "Great First Cause," the "Energy from which all things proceed." Like the person, examined by the Civil Service, who, asked the distance from sun to earth, answered, "I do not know how far the sun is from the earth; but it is far enough so that it will not interfere with the proper performance of my duties at the Customs Office," so people with phrases like "the Great First Cause" put God an immeasurable distance off. No one has dealings with a "Great First Cause," no "Great First Cause" ever had vital, personal, constraining meanings for anyone. Rather across infinite distance and time unthinkable, we vaguely picture a dim Figure, who gave this toboggan of a universe its primal shove and has not thought seriously of it since. So a wanderer down the street might put a child upon her sled and giving her a start down-hill, go on his way. She may have a pleasant slide, but he will not know; she may fall off, but he will not care; there may be a tragic accident, but that will not be his concern — he has gone away off down the street. Multitudes of nominal believers have a god like that.

In comparison with such, one thinks of people like Livingstone. His God was compassionately concerned for Africa, spoke about Black folk as Hosea heard Him speak concerning Israel, "How can I give you up? How can I let you go?" until the fire of the divine earnestness lit a corresponding ardor in Livingstone's heart and he went out to be God's man in the dark continent. Such people have smitten the listless world as winds fill flapping sails, crying "Move!" And the God of such has been tremendously in earnest.

III

Some gain a God lacking serious purpose, not by putting Him afar off, but by endeavoring to bring Him so near that they diffuse Him everywhere. Writers tell us that God is in every rustling leaf and in every wave that breaks upon the beach; we are assured that God is in every gorgeous flower and in every flaming sunset. And the poetry of this is so alluring that we cannot bear to have God specially anywhere, because we are so anxious to keep Him everywhere. Preachers delight to illustrate their thought of God with figures drawn from nature's invisible energies —

By such comparisons are we taught to see that God invisibly is everywhere.

For all the valuable truth that such speech contains, its practical issue, in many minds today, is to strip God of the last shred of personality, and with that loss to end the possibility of His being in earnest about anything. He has become refined Vapor thinly diffused through space. Folk say they love to meditate on Him, and well they may! For such a god asks nothing of anybody except meditation; he has no purposes that call for earnestness in them. When little children are ruined in a city's tenements, when the liquor traffic brutalizes people, when economic inequity makes many poor that a few may be made rich, when war clothes the world with unutterable sorrow, such a god does not care. He is not in earnest about anything. For the only thing in the universe that can be consciously in earnest is personality, and when one depersonalizes God, the remainder is a deity who has no love, no care, no purpose. Thousands do obeisance to such a gaseous idol.

From this fallacy spring such familiar confessions of faith as this, "God is not a person; he is spirit." If by this negation one intends to say that God is not a limited individual, that is obviously true; but the contrast between personality and spirit is impossible. One may as well speak of dry water as of impersonal spirit. Rays of radium are unimaginably minute and swift, but they are not spirit. Nothing in the impersonal realm can be conceived so subtle and refined that it is spirit. Spirit begins only where love and intelligence and purpose are, and these all are activities of personality. No one can really believe what Jesus said, "God is Spirit" (John 4:24 NKJV), without being ready to pray as Jesus prayed, "Our Father."

Between an impersonal, diffused, and gaseous god, and the God of the Bible, how great the difference! God's pervading omnipresence is indeed affirmed in Scripture. There, as much as in any modern thought, the heavens declare His glory, the flowers of the field are illustrations of His care, and the influences of His spirit are like the breeze across the hills. To the ancient Hebrew, heaven and sheol were the highest and the lowest, but of each the Psalmist says to God, "You are there," and as for the uttermost parts of the sea, "even there Your hand shall lead me" (Psalm 139:7–10 NKJV). Cries Jeremiah from the Old Testament, "'Am I a God near at hand,' says the Lord, 'and not a God afar off? Can anyone hide himself in secret places, so I shall not see him?' says the Lord; 'Do I not fill heaven and earth?' says the Lord" (Jeremiah 23:23–24 NKJV). And Paul answers from the New Testament, "not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:27–28 NKJV). But the God of the Bible who so pervades and sustains all existence never degenerates into a Vapor. When Egyptian taskmasters crack their whips over Hebrew slaves, He cares. When exiles try in vain to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land, He cares. When evil people build Jerusalem with blood, and rapacious people pant after the dust on the head of the poor, He cares. He is prodigiously in earnest, and those who best represent Him, from the great prophets to the sacrificial Son, are like Him in this, that they are mastered by consuming purpose. The God of the Bible is sadly needed by His people. For lack of Him religion grows often listless and churches become social clubs.

IV

By another road people travel to believe in a God who is not in earnest: they think of Him as an historic being. It was said of Carlyle, shrewdly if unjustly, that his God lived until the death of Oliver Cromwell. Whatever may be the truth about Carlyle, it is easy to find folk whose God to all intents and purposes is dead. Long since He closed His work, spoke His last word, and settled down to inactivity and silence. He made the world, created humanity, thundered from Sinai, established David's kingdom, brought back the exiles, inspired the prophets and sent His Son. He once was earnest; the record of His ancient acts is long and glorious, and people find comfort in reading what He used to do. They would not explicitly confess it, but in fact they habitually think of God in the past tense. They cannot conceive the universe as happening by chance, and they posit God as making it; they cannot believe that the transcendent characters of olden times were uninspired, so God becomes the explanation of their power. When such believers wish to assure themselves of God they go to the stern of humanity's ship and watch the wake far to the rear; but they never stand on the ship's bridge, and feel it sway and turn at the touch of a present Captain in control. They have not risen to the meaning of the Bible's reiterated phrase, "the living God."

Höffding tells us that in a Danish Protestant church, well on into the nineteenth century, worshipers maintained the custom of bowing, when they passed a certain spot upon the wall. The reason, which no one knew, was discovered when removal of the whitewash revealed a Roman Catholic Madonna. Folk had bowed for three centuries before the place where the Madonna used to be. So some folk worship deity; He is not a present reality but a tradition; their faith is directed not toward the living God Himself, but toward what someone else has written about a God who used to be alive. They do not feel now God's plans afoot, His purposes as certainly in progress now as ever in human history. They stand rather like unconverted Gideon, facing backwards and lamenting, "Where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about?" (Judges 6:13 NKJV).

Not by what we say, but by our practical attitudes we most reveal how little we believe in an earnest, living God whose voice calls us, whose plans need us, as much as ever Moses or David or Paul was summoned and required. If we say that we do believe in this living God we are belied by our discouragements, deserving as we often do the rebuke which Luther's wife administered to the Reformer. "From what you have said," she remarked, standing before him clothed in deep, mourning black, "and from the way you feel and act I supposed that God was dead." If we say that we believe in a living, earnest God, we are belied by our reluctance to expect and welcome new revelations of God's truth and enlarging visions of His plan. Willing to believe what the astronomers say, that light from a new star reaches the earth each year, we act as though God's spiritual universe were smaller than His physical, and do not eagerly await the new light perpetually breaking from His heavens. But most of all the little influence which our faith in God has upon our practical service is a scathing indictment of its vitality and power. No one who really believes in an earnest, living God can have an undedicated life. We may not think of the Divine in the past tense chiefly; the present and the future even more belong to God; and through each generation runs the earnest purpose of the Eternal, who has never said His last word on any subject, nor put the final hammer blow on any task. A faith like this, deeply received and apprehended, is a masterful experience. It changes the inner quality of life; it makes the place whereon we stand holy ground; it urgently impresses us into the service of those causes that we plainly see have in them the purpose of God. No outlook upon life compares with this in grandeur; no motive for life is at once so weighty and so fine.

V

One of the subtlest fallacies by which we miss believing in an earnest God is not describable as an opinion. People fall into it, who neither reduce God to a Great First Cause, nor diffuse Him into a vapor, nor regard Him as an historic being. They rather allow their superstitious sentiments to take the place of worthy faith. Plenty of people who warmly would insist on their religion, reveal in their practical attitudes how utterly bereft of serious moral purpose their God is. They think their fortune will be better if they do not sit thirteen at a table or occupy room thirteen at a hotel; on occasion they throw salt or look at the moon over their right shoulders and rap on wood to assure their safety or their luck; and to be quite certain of divine favor they hang fetishes, like rabbits' feet, about their necks. Their attitude toward such surviving pagan superstitions is like Fontenelli's toward ghosts. "I do not believe in them," he said, "but I am afraid of them." That this is a law-abiding universe with moral purpose in it, such folk obviously do not believe. Their God is not in earnest. He spends His time watching for dinner parties of thirteen or listening for folk who forget to rap on wood when they boast that they have not been ill all winter. The utter poverty to which great words may be reduced by meager minds is evident when such folk say that they believe in God.

Even when these grosser forms of superstition are not present, others hardly more respectable may take their place. God is pictured as a King, surrounded with court ritual, in the complete and proper observance of which He takes delight, and any rupture in whose regularity awakes His anger. To go to church, to say our prayers, to read our Bibles, to be circumspect on Sunday, to help pay the preacher's salary and to contribute to the missionary cause — such things as these comprise the court ritual of God. These Christian acts are not presented as gracious privileges, opportunities, like fresh air and sunshine and friendship, to make life rich and serviceable; they are presented as works of merit, by which we gain standing in God's favor and assure ourselves of His benignity. For with those who so conform to His ordinances and respect His taboos, He is represented as well-pleased, and He blesses them with special favors. But any infraction of these rituals is sure to bring terrific punishment. God watches those who do not sing His praises or who fail in praying, and He marks them for His vengeance! Dr. Jowett tells us that in the Sunday school room of the English chapel where as a child he worshiped, a picture hung that to his fascinated and frightened imagination represented the character of God: a huge eye filled the center of the heavens, and from it rays of vision fell on every sort of minute happening and small misdeed on earth. As such a monstrous Detective, jealous of His rights and perquisites, God is how often pictured to the children! So H. G. Wells indignantly interprets his experience: "I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, perpetually waiting to condemn and to strike me dead; his flames as ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been."

This "bogey God" is in earnest about nothing except the observance of his little rituals; he is unworthy of a good person's worship, he has no purpose that can capture the consent and inspire the loyalty of serious folk. How many so-called unbelievers are in revolt against this perversion of the idea of God, taught them in childhood! The deity whom they refuse to credit is not the Father, with "the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Ephesians 3:11 NKJV); often they have not heard of Him. Their denial is directed against another sort of God. "I wish I could recall clearly," writes one, "the conception of God which I gained as a boy in Sunday school. He was as old as grandfather, I know, but not so kind. We were told to fear him." Surely the real God must sympathize with those who hate His caricature. A vindictive Bogey, querulous about the mint, anise, and cummin of his ritual, in earnest about nothing save to reward obsequious servants and to have his vengeance out on the careless and disobedient, is poles asunder from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with His majestic purpose for the world's salvation.

VI

Of all the sentiments, however, by which a worthy faith is made impossible, none is so common, in these recent years, as the ascription to God of a weak and flaccid affectionateness. God's love is interpreted by love's meaning in hours when we are gentle with our children or tender with our friends. The soft and cozy aspects of love, its comforts, its pities, its affections, are made central in our thought of God. We are taught, as children, that He loves us as our mothers do; and as from them we look for coddling when we cry for it, so are our expectations about God. Our religion becomes a selfish seeking for divine protection from life's ills, a recipe for ease, an expectant trust, that as we believe in God He in return will nurse us, unharmed and happy, through our lives. No one intimately acquainted with the religious life of people can be unaware of this widespread, ingrained belief in a soft, affectionate, grandmotherly God. What wonder that life brings fearful disillusionment! What wonder that in a world where all that is valuable has been

the God of coddling love seems utterly impossible!

The lack in this fallacious faith is central; there is no place in it for the movement of God's moral purpose. To ascribe love to God without making it a quality of His unalterable purpose, which must sweep on through costs in suffering however great, is to misread the Gospel. Many kinds of love are known in our experience, from a nursing mother with her baby to a military leader with his men. In Donald Hankey's picture of "the Beloved Captain" we see affection and tenderness, as beautiful as they are strong: "It was a wonderful thing, that smile of his. It was something worth living for, and worth working for.... It seemed to make one look at things from a different point of view, a finer point of view, his point of view. There was nothing feeble or weak about it.... It meant something. It meant that we were his men and that he was proud of us.... When we failed him, when he was disappointed in us, he did not smile. He did not rage or curse. He just looked disappointed, and that made us feel far more savage with ourselves than any amount of swearing would have done.... The fact was that he had won his way into our affections. We loved him. And there isn't anything stronger than love, when all's said and done."

Yet, this Captain, loving and beloved, will lead his men in desperate charges, where death falls in showers, but where the purpose which their hearts have chosen forces them to go. The love of God must be like that; it surely is if Jesus' love is its embodiment. His affection for His followers, His solicitude and tenderness have been in Christian eyes, how beautiful! They shine in words like John's seventeenth chapter where love finds transcendent utterance. Yet this same Master said: "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves" (Matthew 10:16 NKJV); "Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake" (Matthew 5:11 NKJV); "Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name's sake" (Matthew 24:9 NKJV); "They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service" (John 16:2 NKJV); "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:26 NKJV). The love of Jesus was no coddling affection; it had for its center a moral purpose that balked at no sacrifice. He took crucifixion for Himself, and to His beloved He cried, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me" (Matthew 16:24 NKJV). Such love is God's; and preachers who advertise His Fatherhood as a gentle nurse that shelters us from suffering have sapped the Gospel of its moral power. God's love is austere as well as bountiful; He is, as Emerson said, the "terrific benefactor."

Indeed, faith in a God of coddling love may be one of the most pernicious influences in human life. Our trust, so misinterpreted, becomes a cushion on which to lie, a sedative by which to sleep. When ills afflict the world that we could cure, such misbelievers merely trust in God; when tasks await our strength, they quietly retreat upon their faith that God is good and will solve all, until religion becomes a by-word and a hissing on the lips of earnest people. Such misbelievers have not dimly seen the Scripture's meaning, where faith is not a pillow but a shield, from behind which plays a sword (Ephesians 6:16 NKJV) and where we do not sleep by faith, but "fight the good fight of faith" instead (1 Timothy 6:12 NKJV). Or if such misbelievers do rouse themselves to lay hold on their Divinity, it is to demand God's love for them and not to offer their lives to God. As Sydney Smith exclaimed about some people's patriotism, "God save the King! in these times too often means, God save my pension and my place, God give my sisters an allowance out of the Privy Purse, let me live upon the fruits of other men's industry and fatten upon the plunder of the public."

Faith in God never is elevated and ennobling until we overpass "God for our lives!" to cry "Our lives for God!" Then at the luminous center of our faith shines the divine purpose, costly but wonderful, that binds the ages together in spiritual unity. To that we dedicate our lives; in that we exceedingly rejoice. No longer do we test God's goodness by our happiness or our ill-fortune; we are His through fair weather and through foul. No longer do we merely hold beliefs, we are held by them, captured now and not simply consoled by faith. Only so are we learning discipleship to Christ and are beginning really to believe in the Christian God.

VII

From all these common fallacies of thought and sentiment one turns to the New Testament to find the God of the Gospel. The very crux of the Good Tidings is that God is so much in earnest that He is the eternal Sufferer. The ancient Greeks had a god of perfect bliss; he floated on from age to age in undisturbed tranquility; no cry of anyone ever reached his empyrean calm; his life was an endless stream of liquid happiness. How different this Greek deity is from ours may be perceived if one tries to say of him those things which the Scripture habitually says of God. "In all their affliction He was afflicted" (Isaiah 63:9 NKJV); "Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15 NKJV); "God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses" (Ephesians 2:4–5 NKJV); "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son" (John 3:16 NKJV). None of these things that Christians say about their God can be said of a deity who dwells in tranquil bliss.

Indeed let one stand over against a war-torn, unhappy world and try to think that God does not suffer in our agony, and one will see how useless and incredible such a God would be. God looks on devastated lands and does not care; He sits in heaven and sees His children wounded and alone, watches the deaths, the heart-breaks, the poverty of war, its ruined childhood and its shattered families, and He does not care — how impossible it is to believe in such a God! A God who does not care does not count.

Christians, therefore, have the God who really meets the needs of humanity. He cares indeed, and, with all the modesty that words of human emotion must put on when they are applied to Him, He suffers in the suffering of people and is crucified in His children's agonies. God limited Himself in making such a world as this; in it He cannot lightly do what He will; He has a struggle on His heart; He makes His way upward against obstacles that our imagination cannot measure. There is a cross forever at the heart of God. He climbs His everlasting Calvary toward the triumph that must come, and He is tremendously in earnest.

One important consequence follows such faith as this. Confidence in such an earnest, sacrificial God makes inevitable the Christian faith in immortality. Our solar system is no permanent theater for God's eternal purposes; it is doomed to dissolution as certainly as any human body is doomed to die. In the Lick observatory one reads this notice under a picture of the sun: "The blue stars are considered to be in early life, the yellow stars in middle life, the red stars in old age.... From the quality of its spectrum the sun is classified as a star in middle age." Those, therefore, who, denying their own immortality, comfort themselves with prophesying endless progress for the race upon the earth, have no basis for their hopes. "We must therefore renounce those brilliant fancies," says Faye the scientist, "by which we try to deceive ourselves in order to endow man with unlimited posterity, and to regard the universe as the immense theater on which is to be developed a spontaneous progress without end. On the contrary, life must disappear, and the grandest material works of the human race will have to be effaced by degrees under the action of a few physical forces which will survive man for a time. Nothing will remain — 'Even the ruins will perish.'"

If one believes, therefore, in the God who is in earnest, one cannot be content with such a universe — lacking any permanent element, any abiding reality in which the moral gains of our long struggle are conserved. God's purpose cannot be so narrow in horizon that it is satisfied with a few million years of painful experiment, costly beyond imagination, yet with no outcome to crown its sacrifice. In such a universe as Faye pictures, lacking immortality, generation after generation suffer, aspire, labor, and die, and this shall be the history of all creation, until at last Shakespeare's prophecy shall be fulfilled,

How impossible it is for those who believe in God's earnestness to accept such a conclusion! Not that we can describe the life eternal — "It has not yet been revealed what we shall be" (1 John 3:2 NKJV). But that there must be such a life, not a mere continuation of this one, but a fulfilment of it, our faith insists. Only so can this tremendous purpose of the Eternal be justified in its everlasting influence on personality. When we say that God cares, we mean no vague, diffusive attitude toward a system that lasts for limited millenniums and then comes to an uneventful end in a cold sun and a ruined earth. We mean that He cares for personality which is His child, that He suffers in the travail of His children's character, and that this divine solicitude has everlasting issues when the heavens "wax old like a garment." Still Paul's statement stands, one of the most worthy summaries of God's earnestness that ever has been written: "For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God" (Romans 8:19 NKJV).²

Footnotes

¹ George Adam Smith's translation renders the Hebrew with particular vividness: "My heart is turned upon me, my compassions begin to boil." ↩

² Fosdick originally cited Moffatt's translation here: "The creation waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed." ↩