Unseen Spiritual Helpers

“And Elisha prayed and said, * Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see.’ And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” — 2 Kings vi. 17.

It is an old Hebrew story. Many people are fond of exhorting ministers not to preach about the old Hebrews, to let the sins and virtues of the Israelites go, and to talk to the present century about its own affairs. No doubt the exhortation sometimes may be needed, but it is often very foolishly given. What we want is not to let the wonderful history of that ancient people go, but rather to study it far more deeply and wisely. We want to save our present life from being a poor extemporised thing by seeing how God was teaching lessons for this age of ours and for every age, centuries ago. Never was there a history in which God’s working was so manifest, never was there a nation whose evil and whose good was so suggestive. Long may it be before ministers stop preaching and people stop thinking about the ancient Hebrews. It would be the closing of the sublimest leaves of the long human storv. We cannot know how much flatter, vulgarer.

and tamer these halls of our common humanity would seem if they no longer felt the tread and echoed to the voices of the giants of the Old Testament — Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah.

Our story to-day is of EHsha. Let me recall it to you in its few facts, and then see what it means, and how it touches all our life. The king of Syria was making war upon the king of Israel, and the prophet Elisha knew and exposed his plans. The king sent out to capture and destroy the troublesome prophet. He sent a whole army, “horses and chariots and a great host,” and they came by night and compassed the city about, and when the servant of the man of God was risen early and gone forth, behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, “Alas, my master, how shall we do?” And he answered, “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” And Elisha prayed, and said, “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”

There is the story. Would it not be hard to lose its majestic simplicity, because it is a Hebrew story, and what it tells of happened long ago? What modern story will rise up and take its place?

And yet the essence of the story belongs to every time. That is exactly its value. See what it is. A young man believes in and follows the prophet of God. He stands by the cause of righteousness and truth. He does not desert it when it is attacked. He sees the danger and he fears, but there is no sign that he wants to run away. “Alas, how shall I do?” he cries, with the great host of the enemy gathering about him and his master. He is in danger and he is in earnest. And then, a vision is given him. He sees what champions are gathered in the interests of truth. What seemed to be darkness and weakness becomes peopled with forms of light and strength, and the young man sees that his beset and persecuted life is really stronger than its persecutors, and takes courage and stands by to see his enemies struck with blindness and thrown into confusion.

There is in every young man’s soul something which is to him what Elisha was to the young man of our story — something prophetic. The higher nature through some of its deep needs or lofty impulses is always trying to open the eyes of our lower and despondent nature to see the divine and hopeful powers which are at work upon our life. There is in all our temporariness and earthliness something which connects itself with eternity and the spiritual life. This is to the fearful and despondent part of us what the courageous prophet was to the terrified young man. In that conflict between hope and fear, between courage and despair, which is always going on within us when we undertake any great work and see its dangers, it seems to me as if we could hear the better and stronger part of us pleading with God for the worse and weaker part, as Elisha prayed for his young servant — “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see.” And when I see the more spiritual and hopeful temper of a community or of the world always struggling with the blindness and fear that presses on it, again it seems as if the prophet were begging in behalf ot the duller sight and lower life beside him. “Lord, open his eyes.” If there be any discouragement in any good task, any fear at the sight of what a multitude of enemies beset every man’s endeavor to do right, if there be dismay or disheartenment in any soul here, that still is determined to try to serve God (and I do not believe that you can get so many people together as there are here without having many such souls among them), to them I think the old Hebrew story speaks, and I should be very thankful if I could so unfold its meaning as to send them away with a little better hope and faith and courage.

Our subject, then, is this — the unseen spiritual helpers. What are the genuine realities that answer to the horses and chariots that the young man saw when his eyes were opened?

In the first and most general sense, then, I think that spiritual help comes to us when the tasks and duties of our life show us their real purposes and meanings. Each of us is engaged in doing something in this world, and here this morning, in the church’s wide charity, we will suppose that everyone of us is trying to do faithfully his special work. There are school-boys and school-girls with their lessons, and men with their businesses, and men with their patients and their clients, fathers and mothers with their children, church officers with their cares for the church — all of us with our various connections with one another that burst out everywhere with duties. And I do not suppose that any of us keep constantly in such sympathetic relation to our occupations that the form of our occupations does not often present itself to us as an enemy. It seems to be trying to crush us, the routine, the drudgery, the hardship of what we have to do; we feel our life slowly being pressed out of us by the hard tyranny of our work. And then what comes? The only thing that can defend us against the tyranny of the form is the power of the spirit of our work. If you had a business friend who seemed to you most in danger of being conquered by the form of his business life, as so many are, of being made mean and narrow and machine-like, how would you try to save him? Would you not feel sure that if you could make him feel the most sacred purposes of business life, such unselfish purposes, as charity, and the public weal, and the culture of character, you would have armed him against the lower influences of his trade most safely? These are the champions he needs. In every occupation which a man has any right to be engaged in in this world there is a spirit that underlies the form, and it is only by appealing to the protection of the spirit that we can truly strengthen ourselves against the despotisms of the form. We grow afraid, I think, of the form of everything we do, even our worship, so that the tongue falters at the formal prayer, for fear lest its act of reverence should be the most irreverent. What shall we do in such a world of danger? And then, when the Lord opens our eyes to see the souls of these hard, formal things, and we discover how they are always trying to protect their servants from the oppression of formality, and so we take courage for our tasks again, is not that, over again, the blessed vision that the Lord showed to Elisha’s servant when Elisha prayed? Is it not as if we saw horses and chariots upon the mountains stronger than the horses and chariots which we see here upon the plain? We learn that the spirit is stronger than the form, and we take courage. What prayer could his best friend ask for a young man, in the sordid dangers of this common life, than just this “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see always the spiritual meanings and purposes of the things thou givest him to do?” If that prayer is answered, he must go forth with a brave, protected soul.

But while this certainly is true, it is not the main thing; it would not come to much if there were not very much more behind it. When we speak of our spiritual helpers, we mean most of all those actually existent beings, those persons living a higher life than ours, whose life is capable of touching ours and aiding it, the knowledge of whose existence and whose readiness to help us makes us more brave to face the dangers that we meet with because we are not facing them alone. Of all such beings, whether there be only one or multitudes, who can be made known to us, one stands above all others, one stands eternally alone, because all others get whatever help they have to give us primarily from Him; they are His instruments and ministers. That one is God. The true unveiUng of the human eye, the true sight that gives courage to a human heart, is the sight of the Divine Father standing above all our struggling life, looking down into it with love, with pity, and ready to strike down our enemies the moment that they grow too strong for us. Get what support we may out of the essential dignity and spirituality of our work itself, still its great spiritual m.eaning must always be that it was given us to do by God our Father. That is its real beauty. That is its true glory. And so our first discovery of spiritual help was really only an anticipation of this, the great strength of a soul which comes to the sight of a father and knows that it is not fighting alone but God watches and works for it above. It is the bewildered soldier looking up out of the dust and smoke and blood, and seeing his captain standing calm and watchful up there where he can survey the whole field and manage the whole battle.

This is the wonder of the life of Jesus Christ. The incarnation was the close meeting of God and man. They had been struggling together. Man had been fitfully reaching out after God. God had been patiently offering himself to man from the beginning. In Jesus Christ they met. What was the issue? A perfectly strong and brave humanity! What made that humanity so brave and strong? Was it not this, that it was always seeing God? We think it strange that Jesus could stand so bravely before the Pharisees and the Romans and feel no fear. Was it strange if His Father were closer to Him than Romans and Pharisees all the while and hid them from Him; if the trumpets and the chariots upon the mountain were so loud in His ears that He could not hear the clatter of the hosts upon the plain? Our Pharisees are so much nearer and clearer to us than our Father. The secret of courage is so simple after all. We do not fear the danger when we see the defence, so that courage — anything above the mere animal courage of the savage — is clear-sightedness. And yet men talk as if the belief in a protecting Father, a true God, were a mere matter for discussion and debate, and did not tell right home upon the strength and grace and happiness of every human life.

But let us be a little more definite. We say that “seeing God” is the source and secret of all true courage. What do we really mean by seeing God? As soon as we own that the sight of the bodily eyes is impossible, we own that there is a figurative element in the expression. Let us see what it is. To see God, then, I think, may be separated into these three elements. First, it is to recognize His character as the ruling law of the universe. The qualities of God we know. They are involved in our very conception of Him. He is righteous, just, loving, true, pure. Now when your eyes are opened, you see these divine principles running everywhere. All history is the story of their development; all life is hung upon them. Their imperiousness and loveliness appear on every side. You look down into every cleft of life and there they lie under all. You look in through every shell of life, and there they work behind all. They are everywhere. God is everywhere. And seeing them you see God.

And, secondly, to see God is to see God’s purposes in everything. The two are one in essence, but different in apprehension. But when the world opens to you as a plan of God, when all existence is vocal with His meanings, when His intentions thread the universe, so that he who reads human progress, in its largeness or its littleness, reads God’s will; that, again, is seeing God.

And still more to see God is to be conscious of our own spiritual relations to Him, to know as a comfort and a motive that He loves us, to be surrounded with His companionship, to find that what we do depends not merely upon what He is but upon His being present with us; in a word, to love our Father with an active love — that is a life for which the devout soul finds no adequate description but that it is “seeing God.”

This, then, is what we mean by “seeing God.” It is to have the whole world as we think of it, as we live in it, full of His character, His purposes, and His love. Do we not understand, then, what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ in His incarnation was the prophet by whom such a sight of God became possible to men. He brought the righteousness of God and made it manifest, a clear fact where all men could read it. He laid it like a new silver light across the murky surfaces that we were all familiar with. He made the lives of fishermen and publicans the scaffolding on which He hung its exhibition. And so, too, He made the purposes oi God the great important lives along which all existence ran. He let us see that the course of the great nations and the current of quiet lives were all running the way that one supreme and omnipresent will had chosen. And of the love of God, what shall we say? He wove its records everywhere. He spun it in the color of the lily and made us hear it in the noiseless fall of the sparrow. He made all sorrow and all joy its ministers. And then at last He hung it on a cross so high that no pride could tower so high as to overlook it, so low that no most abject humility could fall so low as not to be within its light. This is what Jesus did. He did not bring God into the world. God forbid we should think that! God had never been out of the world He made and loved. He touched the world with His life and made it everywhere a luminous utterance of God. And then, what else? He opened the blind eyes of every man who would become His servant, and bid him see. He regenerated man. He brought him back, that is, into the first condition, lost so long, in which his eyes were open and he could see the God who was everywhere. “To as many as believed Him, to them gave He power to become the Sons of God.” He redeemed man. He brought him back into the Eden of the perfect reconciliation. Once more he might see God. No longer with the eyes of sense but all the more clearly to the inner vision of the renewed obedient soul, the Lord God walked with man among the trees of the garden of the Christian life.

How else shall we explain the courage which is always coming to the weakest and most timid Christian hearts? We are here frightened and perplexed with the distresses and the enemies, the doubts and the disasters of our lives; we are beset on every side. And then we cry out to our master and our prophet, “What shall we do?” And He prays to His Father for us. “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see.” He prays His own mediatorial prayer, “Father, I will that they whom Thou hast given me to be with me where I am, that they may see my glory which Thou hast given me.” And then God does open our eyes and we see Him in Christ even as Christ sees Him, and the world cannot terrify us or make us afraid, for the Friend we see above is stronger and more real than the enemy we see below, and we rest in the satisfied knowledge of His righteousness and will and love, the satisfied sight of Him.

And now can we not go farther still when we are talking of our unseen spiritual helpers? We go with timid feet, not sure of the ground we walk on and yet sure that there is ground, and irresistibly impelled to feel for it and find it. We cannot separate ourselves from the great human conviction that beside the supreme personal life of God, which is the source of all existence, there are other spiritual beings, of many varying orders, who do His will, who help His children, and are the emanations of his life in other worlds as man is here in this grosser world of flesh and blood. The divine existence multiplies itself. The company of spiritual beings who surround Him with their loyalty and love, the angels in countless orders sweeping upward from the ministers of man’s lower wants up to those who stand nearest to the throne — all these in some belief or other have been included in the faith of every race of men, of almost every man, who had come to the knowledge of a spiritual world and trusted in a God. We must not rob ourselves of the strength and richness that the thought of their existence has to give.

What shall we say, for instance, of the beings whom the young man saw gathered in the mountain when his eyes were open? Were they flesh and blood warriors like the Syrian army camped there in the plain below? Were they mere ideas, visions that had no objective reality whatever, the mere pictures of a dream? If we had not become such Sadducees in our disbelief of spiritual existence, we should not find it hard to believe that it was neither of these but that with his newly-opened eyes he did indeed see beings of some higher spiritual order, who are always busy about this world of ours, only not visible to the dull senses of our ordinary life.

Certainly there is nothing clearer or more striking in the Bible than the calm, familiar way with which from end to end it assumes the present existence of a world of spiritual beings always close to and acting on this world of flesh and blood. It does not belong to any one part of the Bible. It runs throughout its whole vast range. From creation to judgment, the spiritual beings are forever present. They act as truly in the drama as the men and women who with their unmistakable humanity walk the sacred stage in the successive scenes. There is nothing of hesitation about the Bible’s treatment of the spiritual world. There is no reserve, no vagueness which would leave a chance for the whole system to be explained away into dreams and metaphors. The spiritual world with all its multitudinous existence is just as real as the crowded cities, and the fragrant fields and the loud battle-grounds of the visible and palpable Judea in which the writers of the sacred books were living. You take away the unseen world with all its unseen actors from the story, and you have not merely made the Bible like other books, you have set it below other books, for you have taken the color out of all its life, the motive out of all its action.

But then the Bible goes farther. It not merely believes in and everywhere assumes the existence of spiritual beings. It believes that to certain conditions even of our fleshly humanity these beings become visible. There is an opening of the eyes that lets us see what is going on in this finer, purer region round about us all the time. Is not this the idea of life that the Bible gives us, as if we were blind men walking in the midst of a great city, hearing its noise, feeling its jostling, and now and then in some peculiar moments of our life opening our eyes, catching one sudden flash of the movement that is going on around us and then shutting them again and taking the moment’s sight back with us into the darkness, to ponder over, and too often, by and by, to come to doubt about whether we really saw it. So here and there an eye is opened. A man or woman in the Bible is found in fit condition and to that deeper sense it is recorded that spiritual beings made themselves visible, as if it were no stranger thing than for the opened eye of the flesh to see the sparkling splendor of the Temple and the Mount of Olives and the high priest walking down the street, and all the familiar scenery of Jerusalem. The Hebrew maiden is about her pure and simple life in Nazareth, and she opens her eyes and sees the messenger who hails her as the highly favored of her Lord; the shepherds are watching in the fields and suddenly they see the angels as truly and as clearly as they see the stars. The women go to the sepulchre and there sit the ministers beside the place where Jesus lay. Paul rides towards Damascus, and lo! he has fallen from his horse and hears a voice which is intelligible to him alone. What shall we say? There is no doubt of what the Bible teaches, and it is what the human heart, taught by God through its own deepest instincts, has always guessed at and believed, that this world of fleshly life is not all, that everywhere there is a realm of spiritual life close to us, and that there is an inner sense to which, when it is wakened, these spiritual beings have often been actually visible and given words of cheer and guidance and encouragement to toiling and discouraged men.

Can we believe anything like that? I am sure as we portray its possibility, we have some sense of more enlargement and richness in the universe, at feast in our universe, in what concerns our life. The narrow walls of the moral life are rolled back and there is more room to act, more space to breathe. The world of the Bible opens with its vast waves of motive coming in like the breath of the morning out of the regions of the unseen. The difference between the Bible with its tides of spiritual life and the modern novel with its narrow studies of human character and action as if they were the highest things in the universe, this difference describes the dignity of a belief in living spiritual influences as contrasted with the low and unenterprising Sadduceeism to which our souls incline.

But can we believe anything like that? Have men ever really seen and talked with beings of a different sort from ours, with spiritual persons belonging to a spiritual region that is always existing though ordinarily unseen? May not they have been mistaken and thought that they were talking with spirits when they really were only talking with them selves? That multitudes of people have made just that mistake there cannot be a shadow of doubt. Of course the spirit-seeing faculty, whatever it is, may be deluded just as the outward eye may be mistaken and think it sees colors when it is only sensitive to some excitement wholly within itself. It is not necessary to credit every ghost-story simply because we know that the dead have been seen by the living; that Peter and James and John did indeed see Moses and Elias on the Mountain of Transfiguration. But one such certain story does break open the seeming impossibility. It does put us where (with all the rareness that we may feel belongs to such conditions) — none of us can venture to say that never again shall mortal eye look on the forms of immortality or mortal ear listen to words uttered from the lips of spiritual beings who have passed out of these lower regions by the door of death. But that is not the chief thing that it gives us. That is not the blessing that we value, such very vague expectation of an uttered word out of or a clear sight into the world of spirits, A true acceptance of the whole Bible idea of ever-present spiritual life would not set us to watching for the apparitions of the dead or for the sight of angels, but it would give us the strength which comes to every work and suffering from the knowledge that this universe is larger than it seems and that it is all peopled with spiritual existences who are God’s ministers to enlighten and to feed our life. The consciousness of many spiritual helpers must come although they are not shown to us in any vision. Enough that men have looked and seen through some break in the cloud the comforting, defending spirits who are doing the will of God in man’s behalf. The brave man need not see any celestial form with spear and helmet by his side, yet he may know as he goes out to the battle that the spirits of justice everywhere are sympathising with him and helping him in unknown ways. The mother may not discern an angel bending over the bed on which her child is laid, but still she may know that there are other watchers by its bed beside herself, spirits whom God has sent to see that none of his little ones take any harm. The

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soul in its bereavement may not look to see here again the very presence and features of the friend whom God has taken, yet still may be sure that even now companionship with that dead but living friend is something more and richer than merely memory of what he was or anticipation of the reunion in some far-off time; that even now, in such unknown ways as soul may present itself to soul, his friend is with him, for encouragement and strength.

Such helps as these the knowledge that there is a world of spiritual beings interested in and busied about the things that concern us in this world of time may give us. And I cannot but think that it will change our whole idea of death. Surrounded by this spiritual life and yet seeing it only here and there through broken gaps of this enveloping mortality, what will it be for us to die? Only to cast this mortality away and stand face to face with the realities that have been close to us all the while. All that has mocked us with half glimpses, all that has flashed before our eyes and darkened again so suddenly that we have hardly dared to remember that we saw it, all that has haunted our hopes and clung to us in spite of the cold Sadducee contemptuousness of the world — all this real to us, the only reality, permanent and real forever. All spiritual companionship, all unknown spiritual protection that has been blessing us in the darkness opened suddenly into the light so that we see it all and enter on the new life that begins with death. Death, then, is the enlightener. It opens the eyes to see the things that are. It is not the carrying of the soul away to some island-planet or some unfound place beyond the sun. Whatever be its mystery of place (and that we cannot know till we know something of what place means to the disembodied spirit), the essential thing concerning death must be that it opens the closed eyes, draws down the veil of blinding mortality and lets the man see spiritual things. This seems to me to change the question that we ask about dying, and make it so much deeper and truer. It is no longer where shall I go when I am dead? but, what shall I be? And so character and the power of higher vision and higher education instead of circumstances, condition, and locality become our study for this life and our ambition for the life to come.

And now have we not come to this, that there are two ways to fight the great battle of life — two different kinds of fighters? One man fights in the light, another in the darkness. One man is always cognizant of the principles of the work he is engaged in, always conscious of God and of the ministries that God employs to bless and influence his life. Whenever he is afraid these presences rise up to reassure him. Whenever the cause looks desperate he turns to the mountain and there are these hosts of the spiritual life. The other man knows nothing of it all; he fights a despairing battle; his heart is full of fear. Tell me, which is the safest, which is the strongest life? I do not say that the man who does not see these higher things is all the same as if they did not exist. I am sure that God and His angels help many a struggler who does not know where the help comes from. But when we see so many men cowards who ought to be brave, so many discouraged who ought to be jubilant and certain of success, when we know what a life all these men might be living if they only really saw these things — who will not pray for every brother, “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see “? Who will not go far and wide telling his brethren of the great things God has to show them? We are not asking God to make a spiritual world for us, only to let us see it as it is. We do not pray God to love us, but we do pray that we may so see His love that we shall love Him back again and be saved by loving.

Be your own prophet and pray it for yourself. Let your highest needs plead with God to enlighten your lower nature, as Elisha plead for his servant. Pray for yourself, “Lord, that I might receive my sight!”

For there are better things to see if you can only see them. And the reason that you do not see them now is not that God hides them, but that our eyes are blind. Let us cry after Christ the Revealer, as Bartimeus cried after Him at Jericho, and He will stop and speak to us, no matter who remonstrates. “Receive thy sight, thy faith hath saved thee,” He will say, and we shall begin to see the higher and the deeper things, and to take courage and be strong. We shall enter on that path of the just which is as a shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.