Seeking Life, and Other Sermons

THESE are Old Testament words, and the Old Testament is everywhere a preparation and anticipation of the New. Its promises are types of better things which men had not yet learned to desire, but for which they were made ready by the clear, tangible benefits which were put at once into their possession. You want to prepare a child to receive from you the most spiritual blessings. You want to give him courage, patience, truth. You want to win him to Christ. But how can you begin? It may be — and it is perfectly legitimate if it is frankly done — it may be that you have to gain his confidence by giving him at once the things which he can understand, shelter and food and clothes and playthings. Then, when he trusts you and knows that you mean his good, you may go on and give him the far more precious spiritual gifts.

Now, these two treatments are really the Old and the New Testaments. The Old Testament gave the people Moses, who led them out of a bodily slavery in Egypt into a physical plenty and luxuriance in Canaan. If they had really been won by that mercy into confidence in and love for God, they would have been ready for the larger gift when the New Testament offered them Christ, the spiritual Deliverer who came to lead them out of the slavery of sin into the freedom and joy of holiness. This is the simplest of all the relations between the outward and visible mercies of God, on one hand, and the inward and spiritual mercies on the other — that the visible mercies are given us to win our confidence, so that He can give us the spiritual mercies. With this idea clearly in our minds, we can often see issuing from it glimpses of light upon the dark parts of God’s treatment of us — why this mercy was given us when we seemed so undeserving, and why that other was snatched away when we were making only a sensual and selfish use of it.

These words of Amos, then, out of the Old Testament, probably had at first their purely physical application: “Thus saith the Lord, Seek ye me, and ye shall live.” It was that promise of long life, as a reward of obedience, which is heard all through the older Dispensation. That promise had met Abraham at his first calling. It had been repeated in the ears of all the Patriarchs. It had dropped in continual reiteration of encouragement and warning upon all the various conditions of that ever-changing Jewish history: “Be obedient, and you shall live. Break my laws, and you shall die,”

There was great truth and reality in that old Jewish motive. We know how many men distrust it now, how many men are wholly unable to believe that there is any connection between the length of men’s lives and their faithful keeping of God’s laws. And yet it is very strange that while, on one side, men it seems are learning to doubt this more and more; at the same time, on another side, men are coming to believe it as their fathers never did. In tracing the connection with fearful clearness between disease and vice, in showing how the evils which men have assigned to chance or fate come really from the violation of natural laws, in every new connection which is traced between the welfare of the physical frame and the moralities, such as sobriety, purity, peace, — in all these departments where our modern spirit is so busy, we are really gathering a new and mighty emphasis into the old words of God to the house of Israel: “Seek ye me, and ye shall live.” We may be stopping short-sightedly in second causes, and talking of “laws of nature” rather than of “God,” but this belief, which is growing stronger and stronger, — that moral character and physical well-being have to do with one another, — must finally break through everything between, and find the real cause of such a connection in a personal God, whom to obey is to live, whom to disobey is to die.

But now let us take the New Testament meaning of this Old Testament promise. When God told

His people that they should have long lives, that their bodies should be so strong and vigorous that they should last out many years — that was a great promise in itself. Physical life is good. To see the sun, to tread the earth, to feel life singing through our veins is very good; we feel it so. But man, when he is at his best, and God, who always is at His best, alike refuse to think of this physical life as final. At its highest height it means some thing higher than itself. Both as type and as instrument, the body in its best health stands for the healthy soul behind it. All that we say of the body may be said of the soul as well. It, too, lives and dies, is sick or healthy, suffers and enjoys, grows and decays. And when we are truly sensible of the superior value of the soul, we are ready to take every new gift of strength that God gives the body, as a token from Him that He means the soul to be strong. So the New Testament correspondent of the Old Testament promise of physical life, is spiritual life, the soul’s life.

We know what is meant by a live soul. The young people who are listening to me have begun perhaps to discover already how much of their souls there is that is really not alive, to feel how impeded and restrained they are. Those of you who are older know the long struggle against spiritual deadness only too well. Perhaps you have given it up in despair, and have thrown forward into the other world all the hope that you have yet left of spiritual life. ‘’When I get there, then I shall live,” you say. The life of the soul means the perfectly free and healthy action of all its powers on every side. When we get sight of that, when we hear that promise in its words, then the Old Testament offer, “Seek me, and your soul shall live,” has turned into the New Testament invitation, “He that hath the Son hath Life.” “Because I live, ye shall live also.”

So far we have been trying to see what, in the deepest sense, it really is to live. But we want to understand also what it is to “seek the Lord,” which is declared to be the condition of true life. When we know that, we shall be ready to bind the two together and understand the whole. What is it, then, to seek anything which is a condition of life? I suppose it is to put one’s self into sympathy or harmony with that thing and its processes, so that we shall not work against it, but work with it, and be always carried along by its currents to our best results.

Take one or two universal illustrations of this idea. We are all beings living in the midst of nature. Natural forces in immense variety are all around us. They are working ceaselessly either to build up or to destroy our human life. Whether they build us or destroy us depends upon how we relate ourselves to them. If we are willing to study them and obey them, to find the nature of fire, water, air, and treat them in conformity with their natures, then they are our servants and we live by them. If we disregard their natures, and let our lives run across their processes at random, how soon they sweep us aside and kill us! The fire burns us or the water drowns us ruthlessly. They are not life, but death, to us.

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