The Bible and God's Thoughts
The Golden Milestone, in the City of Rome, was the point at which the many roads, running from all directions in the Empire, met and converged.
By at least fifty different lines of argument and demonstration, we may approach as a goal the conclusion that the Holy Scriptures are of divine origin. To one of these reference has been made hitherto only incidentally, yet its value might well entitle it to fill the space of an entire volume: namely, the mark of God’s mind and heart upon this book.
In the fifty-fifth chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, 8th to 13th verses, there is a distinct challenge from Almighty God to test His Word by two great criteria:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts;
Neither are your ways, My ways.”
(i.) Are the thoughts contained in this book
superhuman thoughts? And are the ways or methods or plans of working suggested here like unto man’s, or unlike unto man’s? That is the first test.
(2.) What is the moral character and power of this book? Is it superior to all others in moral and spiritual teaching? And, especially, is it superior to all ethical or moral systems as a dynamic force in the transformation of character, and the regeneration of human society?
We confine ourselves for the present to the first: “My thoughts are not your thoughts” — that is, God’s conceptions of things are not man’s conceptions. The method God uses to express this is to remind us how high the heavens are above the earth, — even so high are His ways and thoughts above those of men. They belong to an infinitely elevated plane; His thoughts of things and ways of working are not only unlike men’s, but are often opposite or contrary and contradictory to the dictates of human wisdom.
In Cudworth’s “Intellectual System of the Universe,” the bottom thought is that the signs of a divine mind are impressed upon the universe of matter. The difference between the Corelli Marbles and the blossoming of stone in the Cathedral of Milan is the difference between the bed-rock in
the quarry, and the sculptured stone that has been shapen and polished by the genius of a master-architect; the difference between the master painting and the rude pigments on the palette, is that brains are mixed with the colours, — the artist’s mind manifests itself on the canvas. If a mass of iron filings are put upon a sheet of paper and a bar magnet underneath, there will be a strange activity on the part of the iron filings: they will assume, as though instinct with life, various circular and spiral forms, each particle attaching itself to those on either side. The invisible current of the magnet shapes that chaos into the symmetry and beauty of a cosmos.
The Bible is composed of letters and words and sentences, but an invisible current of Divine Life pervades the book, and makes it God’s Living Oracles, and so its contents assume beauty, proportion, symmetry. Letters form into words; words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs in which the mind of God is expressed. Just so far as it is possible that a book should be, this book is the mirror of the mind of God. His intellectual impress is on it, organising its truths into a divine system, and there is no other book that compares with it as to the intellectual rank of its contents.
The word “idea” has been thought by some to combine two Latin words — in Deo — “a thought in God” — a conception that is first in the divine mind. In this sense the Bible is full of ideas; thoughts that, born in the mind of God, belong to a far more exalted plane than the thoughts of men.
For instance, the idea of Infinity — a word which seems to express the natural or essential attribute of deity, in a general way, better than most others. Infinite literally means “without bounds.” There is no limit to God — to His power, for He is omnipotent; to His knowledge for He is omniscient; to His presence, for He is omnipresent; to His existence, for He is eternal. He is not only infinite, but immutable, without change as without bounds, for change implies either degeneracy or improvement — a change for worse or for better; but God, being perfect, cannot change; infinity therefore involves immutability.
Such an idea of infinity, with its necessary correlative, immutability, is a conception of God drawn from his Word and found nowhere else. The story is that when Mr. Gillespie was called upon, in that great Westminster assembly, to pray — the assembly at the time seeking some proper designation or definition of God — he began: “O, God, Thou art a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal and Unchangeable in Thy Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness and Truth;” and there came upon that body at once the conviction that God had given a definition of Himself, in the opening sentence of that prayer; and so those very words came to be embodied in that compendium of doctrine, “the Westminster Catechism.”
Where did Gillespie get this conception? Not from any heathen source or human writing, but from a long, reverent and prayerful study of the Word of God. There alone he learned that God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, Unchangeable.
The Grand Canon of the Colorado, in America, is one of the wonders of the world. It is an immense chasm, twelve miles in width, and two hundred miles in length, with perpendicular walls six thousand feet high on each side. Sixty cities like the metropolis of the world with all its hundred suburbs could be put in that chasm; the Falls of Niagara or the Falls of Victoria, in some of the fissures of those rocks, would seem no more than a mountain cascade. St. Paul’s Cathedral at London or St. Peter’s at Rome would be a mere child’s toy on the floor of that great chasm; but even this gives no adequate conception of God’s infinity.
Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars, is so far off that its light, flying 186,000 miles a second,
took nearly nine years to get to this planet. There
213 are other stars, within the reach of telescopic
vision whose rays took twenty, forty, eighty, a
hundred years to reach us. The interstellar spaces
are so vast that our entire solar system, dropped in
the sea of this immeasurable infinitude, would be
but as a few pebbles dropped in the ocean. He
who hewed out the Grand Cafion of the Colorado,
who stretched out the interstellar spaces of the
heavens, is the God that gave this Book, and it
shows that He is its Author, for in it we constantly
meet the thoughts and terms of infinity, the natural
dialect of God.
We have already seen, when adverting to the
vast distances and dimensions of space, what
language the Word of God uses. “As the heavens
are higher than the earth” — not the heavens
where the clouds float, a few miles up; not the
heavens where the visible stars are seen, though
millions upon millions of miles away; but the
depths that no telescope can penetrate, beyond
even the power of photography though it
catches the image of stars invisible even to the
telescopic eye. That is the way God speaks in the
Bible. No one else would naturally use such
terms, or knows enough to do so. They befit
Almighty God only.
Again, “As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. As far as the East is from the West, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us .... The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him.”* Here are the three dimensions of astronomy: Infinite height, breadth, and length. Go as high as we may, there is still a height beyond. However far we go east, there is still an east; however far west, there is a west beyond. God says of sins forgiven, that they are banished to such remoteness that only infinite opposite directions can express it. “And from everlasting to everlasting” — from an eternity that had no beginning to an eternity that has no end — that is the way He measures the length or duration of His love. Four dimensions are similarly united in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians: “That ye may know the breadth” — which is universal comprehension and infinite mercy; “and the length,” which is eternity; “and the depth,” going down to hell to pluck us out; “and the height,” going up to the throne of God to carry us there. The Infinite God is the Author of this Bible: “His thoughts are not man’s thoughts, neither are man’s ways His ways,” and it is written as though God wrote it; it is consistent
* Psalm cm.
with its claims of Authorship; it has His marks upon it.
Take the Biblical conception of God as a Being — the divine nature. God is represented in the Holy Scripture as Trinity — not three Gods, nor an association or combination of three in one; but a Trinity, implying three persons, but one nature.
Three definitions God gives of Himself: “The Fountain of Life,” “Light,” “Love.” These three words are the keys to the Gospel according to John; and the first Epistle of John; and by these three words, their secret chambers are unlocked. Life stands for the sum of all being; Light, for the sum of all intellectual excellence; and Love, for the sum of all moral excellence. Hence God is Life, Light and Love; for, if He be the sum of all being, of all intellectual and of all moral excellence, nothing remains to be predicted of Him; everything else is already included.
God told Moses, when he asked his name, that he might answer the Children of Israel when they should ask, “Who is He that sent you?” “I am that I am,” i. e., “I am He Who am forever.” Afterward He compressed it into two words: “I AM — hath sent you.”* “I am” — the present tense of the verb “to be,” joined with the first
* Exodus IV.
personal pronoun, expresses not only the idea of endless existence, but of an eternal present. This is another divine conception, found nowhere else but in the Bible. Jesus Christ uses similar language when He says to the Jews, “Before Abraham was I-AM” — not” I was. ’ ‘* Abraham had a past, present and future, but Jesus, being equal with the Father, has the past and future equally present before Him, and His existence is one eternal Now, without the successions of time that pertain to our moral existence. The thoughts of God are not as man’s thoughts.
According to the Bible conception, man has a three-fold nature: “I pray God your whole spirit, and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. f This idea recurs in other Scriptures (I Cor. ii, and Heb. iv: 1 2) where the distinction between soul and spirit is brought out. The soul is the natural man, that does not see or know the things of God, and the spirit is the highest part of the man, capable of direct communication with God, enlightened and illumined by the Holy Spirit. “The dividing asunder of soul and spirit,” hints at a realm between the two, which, though connected with each, pertains exclusively to neither, and in which
* John vin. 1 1 Thess. v: 23.
middle realm of being, the “thoughts and intents of the heart” are generated.
Such passages of Scripture, which, together with others, unfold the Bible doctrine of man’s three-fold nature, suggest a three-storied house, the upper story, an observatory, with skylights and majestic windows that look out on celestial prospects; the body, the lowest story, with its five senses, — sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, opening out into the external universe, like doors and windows, through which to gather information about things without, and report to the soul, which is like the second story of the building, shut in and in darkness, but getting by way of the body, through the avenues of the senses, knowledge with regard to the external world. The topmost story, the spirit, the highest of all, is alone capable of direct knowledge of God, and an intimate communion and fellowship with Him. The soul seems to be that part of man’s complex being which may thus derive its information with regard to the world without, through the senses; or of higher truth, through the intuitions of the spirit, which gets its knowledge not through the body or soul only, but through intuition and direct revelation from God. And, in the mysterious
realm lying between the two, imagination, memory, conscience, sensibility, reason, will, gather impulses through body, soul and spirit, and so moral judgments and decisions are formed.
Hence the disaster of the fall. When man fell, the spirit became a death chamber — the windows, darkened, the skylights covered, shut in; nothing left but intuitions, and those not by any means infallible; the vision of heaven and the stars lost. Regeneration is the kindling anew, in that spiritual death-chamber, of the life of God. The Tabernacle may beautifully represent the same truth, — the outer court, the body; the holy place within the veil, the soul; the holiest place within the second veil, the spirit. And, when man sinned, the Shekinah fire was quenched, but, when God in Jesus Christ, gives the Spirit back to man in regeneration, the Shekinah fire glows again, and fills that inner place with divine light. Such conceptions of man are peculiar to the Bible. They are the thoughts of God about man.
The story of the creation of woman, whether
treated as history, poem, or parable, is one of the
most beautiful conceptions in Holy Scripture,
God made a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, opened
his side and took out one of the ribs, and made it
into a woman, and brought her to the man, and He
.said to the man, “BiDine of thy bone; flesh of thy flesh; thy counterpart.” The word means not helpmeet, but “one over against him,” as bone corresponds to socket, as mortice to tenon; a counterpart, one apposite to him, not opposite. Each was adapted to the other so that the proficiencies of the one make up for the deficiencies of the other, and contrariwise. Eve was taken out of Adam’s side; as some one has suggested, not out of his head to rule over him; nor out of his arm to be his tool; nor out of his foot to be his slave; but out of his breast, nearest his heart, to be nourished, cherished, loved; his equal, his companion, his counterpart. But it took God to think such a thought, and write such a record. It is like Him to have done things that way.
The Bible conception of two worlds is grand — the universe, partly seen, partly unseen; partly temporal and transitory, passing away, taking different shapes and forms, waste going on and replenishment; partly unseen, invisible, eternal, immutable. Life is a ladder. Like any ladder, it rests on things below, and reaches to things above; and, as you go up, you leave things, below, farther down and approach nearer to things at the top. Life’s ladder rests on material things that may be tested by the five senses; we mount one rung, and
meet what can be tested only by four senses out of the five; another rung, and we meet what can be tested by only three; then by two; still another rung, and we find what can be tested only by one, like light, which appeals to the eye, but not to the hearing, touch, taste, or smell, yet it belongs to the material realm. Still higher, we come to verities that pertain to the universe and have to do with matter, yet which no sense ever has discerned. Life was never seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelt. Yet, do you doubt it? What makes the difference between a living body and a corpse? The corpse has the same features, eyes and ears, hands and feet; but there is something in a living body that is not in a corpse. Put a living human being in a metallic casket and seal it up air-tight. You have scarce done it before something has fled which you cannot keep in with walls nor keep out by locked doors. Nobody knows what it is, but it is real. What the Bible teaches is that, as we go from this lower sphere up this ladder of life, we come to an unseen and invisible realm, far greater, grander, more important than what the senses perceive; and that God has given us other senses by which to explore this invisible realm. In the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we read of the “senses exercised to discern good and evil” — not physical senses, of course, which cannot discern good and evil, but another set of senses which are to be exercised upon intellectual and moral subjects. Faith is the sense of the invisible; hope is the sense of the future; memory is the sense of the past; sensibility is the sense of moral attraction and repulsion. Such are some of the senses God has given to explore the invisible world.
Many other divine thoughts are found in this Book, and nowhere else. God’s thoughts are not man’s; they are above and often, also, contradictory to the ideas of man.
What is man’s notion of love? His love is guided by his liking. He loves what he thinks is lovable, and where advantage is to be got from loving, in the response of reciprocal affection. Man gives where he can get. How different God’s love. He loves without reference to His likings, or He would never have loved sinners. He loves what is unlovable that He may make it lovable. He gives lavishly and infinitely, and gives the best He has to those from whom He receives nothing. Such is the difference between God’s ways and man’s ways. Man loves and gives for the sake of being loved and receiving gifts; God loves where He is not loved and never will be, and gives where He does not, and never will, receive.
What is God’s idea of greatness? “The king.s of the nations exercise lordship over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them; but it shall not be so among you (Matt, xx: 25. Luke XXII: 25.)...” Jesus, taking off His outer garments, and putting on the slave’s apron, and girding Himself, took a basin of water and washed the disciples’ feet, wiping them with the towel wherewith He was girded. The two most menial offices that could be performed by a Jew, were to unlatch the shoe and to wash the feet. Christ did not unlatch the shoes, because they had been left in the vestibule as the disciples had come into the banqueting room; the only other menial act He could do, to descend to the lowest depths of drudgery, was to wash their feet. The Creator of all worlds and creatures, washed the feet of His own disciples. Is there anything like that outside the Bible?
Take the idea of incarnation. God, made flesh, and coming to dwell among men, does not take His place where He belongs, at the top of the social pyramid, but at the bottom. He associates Himself with the poorest and lowest and least of earth. Christ never owned a square foot of territory on the world He made. He was the object of charity, even the clothes He wore no doubt being
the gift of women that ministered to Him of their substance. He had nothing, yet He owned everything. What conceptions these are! And when Christ died for man, it was not after a respectable, not to say, honorable fashion, like a general, falling in battle. The Creator and Redeemer of mankind was crucified between thieves, having been first exchanged for a robber and murderer. Such is the unique and paradoxical character of God’s ideas and ways.
How, again, infinite simplicity of method is combined with infinite sublimity of teaching. Take God’s account of creation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Then put alongside it Mr. Herbert Spencer’s final definition of evolution:
“Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”
Suppose the Bible were written in that style.
Even the metaphysicians themselves could not
understand it. What kind of a book would that
be to put into the hands of little children to learn
the way of life? “Heterogeneity,” “homogeneity”
and “parallel transformation!” God is divinely simple. “To as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that beHeve on His name.” BeHeving, then, is receiving — the simplest act of which we are capable. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If God gave, all man has to do is to take. There are seven words in the Bible used to express this initial act of faith, and they all convey one idea — reception: Look, hear, taste, take, come, trust, choose. To take in a prospect, we look; to take in music, we hear; to take in food, we taste; to receive a gift, we take; to take in a territory, we come, or walk; to take a friend, we trust; to take a resolve, we choose. So easy to be understood, that the simplest can grasp all that is necessary. Not only God’s infinity, sublimity, and divine originality, but His simplicity, are impressed on the Scriptures indelibly.
These are Living Oracles. His vitality is inbreathed into this Book, and man cannot destroy it. A colossal statue of “Liberty” stands in New York Harbour, and every night the birds, dashing against the lantern, beat themselves into insensibility, and fall at its base; and, in the morning,
heaps of carcasses are found there, dead. But the
225 light shines on, quenchless, serene. Satan’s birds of the night beat against God’s light, threatening to put it out and leave the world in darkness, but they are like waves that beat against the rocks only to cleave themselves in twain.. As well attempt to put out the stars or the sun with a watering pot. When all those who oppose and assault the Word of God have gone into the darkness of perpetual night, that Light will still shine on, and many a poor mariner will by it be guided to the harbour of everlasting rest,