Reality and Mystery

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; and so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.”

john iii. 8.

Let us try to get the feeling of the happenings on this eventful night. It is the month of April. The land is beginning to be fragrant with the treasures of the Spring. And there is a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the acknowledged spiritual aristocracy of the Jewish people. He had been moved by the words and deeds of one Jesus, a Nazarene. Again and again he had sought more intimate knowledge of this mysterious Being, and he had thereby incurred the contempt of his fellow believers. He was stirred with disquietude. Some inner chord in his spirit began to vibrate like an ./Eolian harp when touched by the fingers of the wind. The little he knew made him eager to know more.

He would dearly like the privilege of personal communion. But the menace of his sect was heavy and immediate. He was timid. He was not ready for courageous venture. Truth was luring him, but he was not yet a fearless crusader in her quest. He would follow her under the cloak of the night.

So when the darkness had fallen he left this home and went through the quiet streets. He went down the roadway outside the city gate and crossed over the brook Kedron. He climbed the slope of the Mount of Olives to the camp of the Galileans, where Jesus lived. He sought out the tent of the Nazarene, and the two men drew apart in the moonlight and walked away among the olive trees. Their conversation probably lasted all through the night, and yet the record which is given to us is less than three hundred words. What we are told is like the stakes which are erected across moorland tracks to indicate the way, and we can discern the road of their intercourse. Their conversation wound through mystery after mystery. And again and again Nicodemus broke into the words of the Master with the wistful plea, “How can these things be?” “How?” “How?” “How?”

Again and again his intellect faltered and the mystery of things plunged him into bewilderment. And toward morning a wind breathed through the olive trees and set all the leaves a-whispering. And the Lord caught hold of it and made it the messenger of the truth. “The wind bloweth where it listeth; thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” It is reality though it is a mystery. Its presence and movement are certain although its secrets are undisclosed. The wind is a minister of vitality even though its origin and its destiny can never be traced. It impresses itself upon us with firm assurance, yet it brings no luminous satisfaction to the intellect. “The wind thou hearest is a reality trailing clouds of mystery.” “Thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.” Nicodemus felt the breathings of the morning air although he had no knowledge of its birthplace or its grave.

So it is with the things of the Spirit. The great Teacher told this disquieted Pharisee that there are momentous happenings in the world of the Spirit, and their reality is not in the least degree impaired by the absence of a rational explanation. We can be sure of the wind even though we cannot explain it. We can be sure of spiritual realities even though reason limp and loiter on the road. In a word, we can have experience long before we have explanation. We can have spiritual reality before intellectual clarity. We can have life before light. We can be sure of the wind even when reason has not put its mysteries into bonds.

Now this is not a disparagement of the intellect. We do not disparage things by placing them in their appointed rank and order. We do not disparage the fruit of a tree when we place it in the autumn-time rather than in the spring. I do not disparage the alphabet when I say that a child can talk long before he knows that the alphabet exists. It is just a matter of grade, and order and succession. And when it is said that in the realm of the Spirit we can have happenings which are impressive before they are expressive, that life can have communion with realities before intellect has made her survey and begun to offer explanations, we are only proclaiming the divine order, and we are saying that the loitering intellect does not impoverish my assurance because of its delay.

Reality and mystery! The two are wedded together continually. It is even so with love. Love is a tremendous reality of which the reason itself can offer no explanation. And when reason makes a venturesome attempt to explain it the result is always grotesque. Have you ever read what professes to be an intellectual explanation of love? If you have the opportunity, read the philosophic analysis of love which Professor Bain gives in his book on the emotions; or take any book of moral philosophy, and wander down its highroads of detailed analysis of human affection, and then return to your own love of your fiancee, or of your wife, or of your child. And it is like returning from some dull herbarium, where everything is dry and withered, to the wild flowers of nature and to the wandering perfumes of the honeyed woods. Love itself is a glorious reality. But intellect has no lamp to disengage its secrets. We can be perfectly sure when we are in love even if the philosopher is dumb.

Now, we are perfectly ready to acknowledge this order and experience in such things as I have named. But a certain unwillingness arises when we turn to even greater matters of the spirit. When we direct our minds to the supreme spiritual realities we are inclined to argue that things are unreal unless the intellect can unravel their secrets and present them in luminous understanding. In these matters we talk and we reason as if reason were the only faculty of assurance. We argue as though intellect were everything. We speak as if we have no other power of apprehension. But we have many powers. We have powers of intuition. We have higher sense-perceptions which give us mystic sight, and taste, and touch. That was the Master’s teaching to Nicodemus on this eventful night. He told him he could have assurance of spiritual reality long before he had powers of understanding.

The recognition and acceptance of this teaching would bring a great emancipation to many distressed and bewildered lives. They are giving undue ascendancy to the reason. Shall I say they are making life a monarchy, and they are placing reason on an unshared throne, when life is purposed to be a republic, with many powers in honourable office, and all sharing in holy sovereignty? There are intuitions, there are discernments, there are finer senses, spiritual instincts; there are powers affectional and spiritual as well as rational; and reality can impress itself upon these with such imperative compulsion that I am able to say: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” “I know Him in whom I believed.” “The wind bloweth!” I know it! I hear it! I feel it! I may not be able to tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth, but I know it; nothing can impair that final sense of real experience.

Now let us take the Master’s teaching to some commanding mysteries which are nevertheless commanding realities. Take what we call the mystery of reconciliation. Is it a mystery? Yes. Is it also a reality? Yes. What is this reconciliation which is both reality and mystery? I wrote that question upon a paper before me on Tuesday morning. It was a gloomy and a heavy morning. Swift, massive, storm clouds were moving across the skies. Pelting rain and hail were falling. And then, in a moment, the clouds broke as if some powerful hand had torn a jet-black robe, and the sun shone through, and poured its warm and genial treasures upon me. And that, I think, is the scriptural figure of the spiritual happening when a man is reconciled to God. The clouds break, and the sun shines through!” Ye were once darkness, but now are ye light in the

Lord.” There is the darkness of guilt. Clouds of alienation roll between us and the Lord. And then the clouds are riven, and in the bright shining there is a glorious sense of at-one-ness with the Light of life. We are conscious of rectified relationships. The soul is bathed in the friendlylight of God’s countenance. The ministry of forgiveness leads into the treasures of peace. “Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is come.” Well, may I not know this reality of reconciliation? May I not be sure of it? May I not be as certain of it as Nicodemus was certain of the warm, wandering air of the spring-like April dawn? My soul is sure. I know!

But then intellect comes along, or reason, if you prefer the name, and she challenges the experience. “Now let us test it,” she says. “Let us lay it all out in ordered analysis. Let us present it in the form of propositions. Let us see it in the form of a syllogism.” Intellect says to me, “How can these things be?” I answer her challenge: “The wind bloweth, and I hear the sound thereof.” “Yes,” answers the intellect, “but whence doth the wind come, and whither does it go?” And I can only go a little part of the way in company with reason. I say to her, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son...” Reason impatiently answers, “Yes; but how, why, what, when?” And the questions of the intellect are not forbidden. She is not pursuing an unwarranted quest. She, too, is on the Father’s business. But she soon puzzles me. She soon brings me to the frontiers of mystery where the darkness seems impenetrable. My understanding falters and I have no key and no clue. But here is the blessed counsel of the Lord — reconciliation does not loiter until my intellect can explain. I can exult in the sunshine of God’s countenance long before I can evolve a theory which will satisfy the intellectual schools. Some day reason will light her lamps along every road, and every place will be luminous with understanding.

Let us take the teachings of the Lord on the mystery of the new creation. This was the mystery which staggered the mind of Nicodemus, as he walked on the Mount of Olives with his Lord. There was reality and there was mystery; there was mystery, but there was reality. What is the statement of the mystery? We are told that life

225 can shift its heredity. We are told that life can find another and a vital ancestry. The Master teaches that man can become related to a new Adam who is Christ the Lord. Let us state the mystery with the uttermost candour. The stream which flows from Adam’s spring can be stopped, and a new stream can flow from a new fountain, and you and I can be found in the new succession. There are two lines of heredity, the Adam line and the Christ line, and a life can be transferred from one to the other. Life can find a new origin. It can have a new birth. It can flow in amazingly new issues. It can be born again in Christ.

That is a mystery? Yes, indeed. But then there is a mystery about the first birth. What do we know about it? How much do we know about the mystery of life? We know nothing We know nothing! What can reason tell me about that mysterious germ of life which followed some appointed way of detachment, and formed itself into a separate whole and now is known as thee or me? What does reason say about it? What has the philosopher to say about life? I turn to one of them and here is his answer: “Life is the principle of animate corporal existence; the capacity of an animal or plant for self-preservation and growth by the processes of assimilation and excretion, the permanent cessation of which constitutes death.” And so that is as far as intellect can take us in disentangling the mystery of life! I call you to witness that the explanation is only a statement of the mystery. It darkens counsel with words. It is a lamp without light.

But the presence of the mystery need throw no suspicion on the reality. The fact that intellect has no light on life does not discredit our experience of it. We know we are, even though we do not know how we became. Life is an imperious presence even though intellect falters before her. “The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof.”

And as it is with the first birth, and with the mystery and element of life, so it is with the second birth and the mystery of the new creation. The intellect may not be able to ransack the treasury and dispossess the secrets. But it is nonetheless real. A man knows when his being is flooded with new life. I knew in my home in Birmingham when our water system had got communion with the Welsh hills. The gathered treasures of those mist-drenched heights flowed into my own house, and I knew it. And when we come into communion with the Lord, who came that we might have life, and that we might have it more abundantly, we know it, we know it as a reality which cannot be questioned. We know it in richer fulness of being. We know it in new avenues of relation. We know it in new discernments. We know it in new delights. We know it in new griefs. We know it in the new goals and the new roads to reach them. We know it in new points of view and in new outlooks. We know it in new correspondences with God, and man, and the natural world. We know it because we have a new heaven, and a new earth. “The wind bloweth where it listeth!” There is reality indeed. How can we doubt it? A man can as soon doubt his creation in his mother’s womb as doubt his new creation in the renewing life of Christ. The wind bloweth, he hears the sound thereof! We are as sure of it as Nicodemus was sure that he heard and felt those quickening airs of the eastern dawn.

Mystery? Most certainly there is. And reason comes along and challenges our experience. How can these things be? How? How?

How? Trace the circle in intelligent understanding. I can only trace an infinitesimal part of a segment, the rest of the track is closed. How does God renew thy spirit by relating it to new springs? Thou canst not tell. How does God renew the perverted will? Thou canst not tell. How does God refresh the jaded emotions? Thou canst not tell. How does God recreate the prostituted affections? Thou canst not tell. How does God rekindle the smoking and smouldering conscience? How? How? How? And intellect cannot get the answers which make the circle luminous. And therefore intellect is inclined to say: “It is all delusion, pathetic and tragical.” But she would not thus speak of the first life. Her inability to explain does not discredit the experience. Life precedes light. “One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.” One thing I know, the wind is blowing! I hear it! I feel it! I am sure of it! But whence it cometh and whither it goeth I cannot tell. But I can wait. “Now I know in part, but then shall I know, even as also I am known.” Meanwhile, “for me to live is Christ.”

Let us take the counsels of the Master to another mystery, the mystery of divine companionship.

And what is that? It is enshrined in the promise of the Master, “I am with you all the days.” Here is a Friend who is always on the road. What kind of a road? Every sort of road. Through the green pastures and by the still waters! By the steep and rugged paths of righteousness! Through the valley of the shadow of death! Through landscapes crimson with the rose of Sharon! Through the trackless desert where the carrion eagle screams! Along the shining way to the marriage altar! Along the dripping way to the grave! The Friend is on every road.

And that Presence is to millions of people a wonderful reality. They have the impressive sense of a strong and chivalrous companion. “But warm, sweet, tender, even yet a present help is He.” “The healing of His seamless dress is by our beds of pain.” And there are some souls whose sense of communion with the Lord is so intimate that they feel that the removal of the thinnest veil would bring Him face to face. He brings them counsel. When the roads are flinty He bathes their bleeding feet. He imparts unto them strength for fine ventures. He gives them courage when the horizon is gloomy with the menace of the cross. “I will not leave thee nor forsake thee.”

He is the great Friend on the road. Is it a reality? Yes, indeed. “Did not our hearts burn within us when He talked to us by the way?” Is it a mystery? Yes, indeed. And reason comes along questioning how these things can be. How? How? How i But reason stands abashed if she seeks to explain an earthly friendship. And the simpler the friendship the more difficult it is to give it intellectual analysis. And so with this supreme friendship of the Lord. My understanding cannot trace its means and its processes. Its treasures cannot be transferred to any intellectual laboratory. It passeth understanding. But the lameness of the intellect does not discredit the wholeness of the experience. The wind bloweth! I hear it! I feel it! I know it! “And His that gentle voice I hear, soft as the breath of even.” “I know Him whom I have believed.”

And so I appeal to you to honour the experimental faculties of your being as well as the faculty of reason. Give high place and office to your instincts, your intuitions, your affections, your faith, your hope. Follow the path of the noblest assumption. Fling yourself in the way of your faith, and follow it with the strength of a consecrated venture. Offer your life to the Saviour-hood and the governance of Christ. Do it as a sacred act of dedication, do it as a simple act of will. Let it be as an act in which you solemnly surrender your life to the highest. And you shall surely hear the wind that bloweth where it listeth.