The Nearness of God

“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.” — ACTS xvii. 27.

THE surprise of life always comes in finding how we have missed the things which have lain nearest to us; how we have gone far away to seek that which was close by our side all the time. Men who live best and longest are apt to come, as the result of all their living, to the conviction that life is not only richer but simpler than it seemed to them at first. Men go to vast labor seeking after peace and happiness. It seems to them as if it were far away from them, as if they must go through vast and strange regions to get to it. They must pile up wealth, they must see every possible danger of mishap guarded against, before they can have peace. Upon how many old men has it come with a strange surprise, that peace could come to rich or poor only with contentment; and that they might as well have been content at the very beginning as at the very end of life. They have made a long journey for their treasure, and when at last they stoop to pick it up, lo! it is shining close beside the footprint which they left when they set out to travel in a circle.

So we seek to know our fellow-men, and think that the knowledge can be gained only by long and suspicious experience and watchfulness of their behavior; but all the while the real power of knowledge is sympathy, and many a child has that, and knows men better than we do with all our cautiousness. And so we plot, and lay our schemes, and go long ways about to make men like us, it may be to be famous, when their liking lies right at our feet; to be ours certainly any moment when we will just be simple and true, and forget ourselves, and genuinely care for other men, and let them see that we care for them in frank and unaffected ways. We try to grow powerful by parading what we think that we can do, by displaying the tools of our power before men, by showing them why they ought to feel our influence. Only gradually we learn that power lies as close to us as work lies, that no man can really do real work and not be powerful.

It is a vague sense of all this, I think, that makes a certain confusion and perplexity and mystery in life. The idea that there is much more near us than we understand or know, that we are every hour on the brink of doing things and being things which yet we never do or are, — this is what gives to life a large part of its restlessness, and also a large part of its inspiration. We seem to ourselves, sometimes, like men who are walking in the dark up and down a great, richly furnished house, where tools for every kind of work and supplies for every want are lying on every hand. We find rich things, we taste delicious meats, we recognize the fitnesses and the care that have provided most ingenious comforts; but all the while we are not sure but there is some thing even richer, more delicious, more ingenious, which we have almost touched but passed by in the dark.

There comes in life to almost all men, I suppose, a certain sense of fumbling, a consciousness of this vague living in the dark. And out of it there come the everlasting and universal characteristics of humanity, which are in all men of every age and every time, which belong to man as man, — the ever reap pearing and unquenched hope, the sense that nothing is quite impossible, the discontent with any settled conditions, the self-pity and pathos with which men always regard their own lives when they are thoughtful, and the self-reproach which is always lying in wait just under the surface of our most complacent vanity. All of these — and all of them belong so to human life that the man who has not any of them is an exception — all of them come from that condition in which men vaguely know that they are always missing the things that they need most, that close beside them are most precious things which they are brushing with their robes, which they are touching with their fingers, but which, lying in the dark, they cannot see.

And now suppose that it were possible for any being, standing where he could look at man, apart from him and yet in fullest sympathy with him, to watch his fumbling with a sight that could see through the darkness. What would his feeling be about this humanity that he saw forever missing the helps and chances that it needed, missing them often only by a finger’s breadth? How solemn his sight of man would be! Right by the side of our thinking race to-day lie the inventions and discoveries of the years to come. This seer, to whom the darkness is no darkness, would discern them all. He has always seen how man has missed the nearest things. He saw how for ages the inventions which the world has already reached — the quick-hearted steam, the eager, trembling, vocal electricity, the merciful ether that almost divinely says, “Be still!” to pain, — how all these lay unfound just where the hand of man seemed to touch them a hundred times, and then wandered on unwittingly to play with trifles. He saw how a continent lay hid for ages from the eyes of men. He saw how hearts came and went in this world, always just touching on, just missing of, the great comforting truths of a personal immortality, till Christ with His Gospel brought it to light. He has seen how single souls have gone through life burdened, distressed, perplexed, while just beside them, so close that it seemed as if they could not step an inch without seeing it, so close that it seemed as if they could not move without finding their hot and tired souls bathed in its rich waters, flowed the comfortable faith they wanted, the river of the Water of Life which their death was crying out for.

What must be the feeling of such a being about human life? Pity and awe. A blended sense of what a vast endowment man has, what a vast thing it is to be a man, and at the same time of what a terrible thing it is to miss so much, — the feeling with which even the weakest child of Gaza looks at the blind giant Sampson, helplessly feeling for the great columns of the house. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered thy children, but thou wouldst not” — Jesus, the Saviour, was having just that view of human nature when He cried out so. And who will say that there was not a reverence for Jerusalem mixed with the pity for Jerusalem in the Lord’s heart? And when it is not Jerusalem, but you or I, who is not exalted and solemnized when he is able to rise up and believe that there is not merely pity for the sinner who can be so wicked, but reverence for the child of God who might be so good, blended into that perfect unity of Saving Love with which Jesus stoops to lift even the vilest and most insignificant of us out of his sin?

And now, after all this, let us come to our text. St. Paul is preaching on Mars Hill to the Athenians. We hear a great deal about the eloquence, the skill, the tact of that wonderful discourse; of how St. Paul, with exquisite discrimination, said to those men of Athens just the right thing for them. That is putting it too low. The power of his tact was really love. He felt for those men, and so he said to them what they personally needed. And he was, as regarded them, just where the looker-on whom I was picturing is with regard to the men stumbling and fumbling in the darkness of which I spoke.

Never were people on the brink of so many of the highest things, and missed them, as these Athenians. They felt all the mystery, the mysterious suggestiveness of life. They built their altar to the unknown God. The air around them was all tremulous with power. They were always on the brink of faith, without believing; always on the brink of divine charity, yet selfish; always touched by the atmosphere of spirituality, yet with their feet set upon the material and carnal. Of such men there were two views to be taken by one who looked in upon their darkness from a higher light. Easy enough it is to be contemptuous; easy enough to cry out “Hypocrite!*’ to condemn as hopelessly frivolous and insincere this life which always walked on the brink of earnestness, and yet was never earnest; to condemn, as the sweeping critics of all modern doubt are apt to do, every altar to the “Unknown God “as if those who had built it certainly cared more about and worshipped more the “unknown” than the “God,” delighted more in His uncertainty than in His Divinity. Easy enough it is to do this, but possible, at least, it is to do some thing very different from this, possible to be impressed as St. Paul was with reverence and pity that left no room for contempt, reverence for the men who came so near to so much, and pity for the men who missed it so sadly. Oh, be sure, my friends, that whenever you see a poor bewildered thinker, or a puzzled youth feeling about vainly for his work, his place, his career in life, there are those two thoughts for you to have about them both, — the thought of contempt and the thought of reverence and pity; and be sure that the first thought is mean and unworthy of a fellow-man, and that the second thought is the thought of the best and wisest and divinest men, the thought of St. Paul and of Jesus Christ.

And now, what makes the difference between these two kinds of observation, these two men with their different sight of a human life? It is not hard to see. Is it not simply that the man who looks upon his brother’s puzzled life with reverence and pity is the man who sees God there behind the life which he is looking at? The man who looks at his brother’s restless life with contempt, is the man who sees no God there, to whom the everlasting human restlessness is nothing but the vain and aimless tossing about of a querulous dissatisfaction. If there is no God whose life and presence, dimly felt, is making men toss and complain, then their tossing and complaining is an insignificant and a contemptible thing. It would be better if they could be calm like the beasts. If there is a God to whom they belong, from whom the thinnest veil separates them; whom they feel through the veil, though they cannot see Him; whom they feel through the veil even when they do not know that it is He whom they feel — then their restlessness, their feverish hope, their dreams and doubts, become solemn and significant, something which any thoughtful man may well delight to study, and may well rejoice if he can at all help them to their satisfaction.

And this is just what St. Paul tells the Athenians.

He says, “You are restless and discontented. You are always seeming to be near something which yet you do not reach. Your feet are always pressing the brink of a knowledge which you never come to know. You are always half aware of something which you never see. I will tell you what it means. Your restlessness, your impatience, your discontent, however petty be the forms it takes, is solemn and not petty to me, because of what it means. It means that God is not far from every one of you.”

Oh, what a revelation that was! What a preaching that was that day on Mars Hill! It was as if one came to a blind child, sitting in a room where he thought himself alone, and wondering at the restlessness which would not let him settle down to quiet thought and work, and said to him, “I can tell you what it means. You are not alone here though you think you are. Your father is here, though you cannot see him. It is his unseen presence that haunts you and disquiets you. All these many disturbances which your mind undergoes are really one disturbance, — the single disturbance of his being here. It is simply impossible for you to sit here as if he were not here. The only peace for you is to know and own his presence, to rise up and go to him, to make your whole thought and life centre and revolve about the fact that he certainly is here, to quiet your disturbance in the bosom of that presence, known, out of which, unknown, your disturbance came.”

And that is what Christianity reveals. What St. Paul said to the men of Athens, Christ says to everybody, to you and me and all these multitudes. He comes to you, and says it: “You are restless, always on the brink of something which you never reach, always on the point of grasping something which eludes you, always haunted by something which makes it impossible for you to settle down into absolute rest. Behold, I tell you what it means. It is God with you. It is Emmanuel. His presence it is that will not let you be at peace. You do not see Him, but He is close by you. You never will have peace until you do see Him and come to Him to find the peace which He will not let you find away from Him. Come unto me, and I will give you rest.” That was the revelation of the Incarnation. Listen, how across all the centuries you can hear the Saviour giving that revelation, that interpretation of their own troubled lives to multitudes; now to Nicodemus, now to the Samaritan woman, now to Pontius Pilate, and all along, every day, to His disciples by what they saw from hour to hour of His peace in His Father.

Listen again. Hear Christ giving the same revelation to-day; and ask yourself this: “If it were true, if God in His perfectness, with His perfect standards in Himself, with His perfect hopes for me, God in His complete holiness and His complete love, — if He were here close to me, only separated from me by the thin veil of my blindness, would it not explain everything in my life?” There is the everlasting question, my dear friends, to which there is only one answer. What else can explain this mysterious, bewildering, fluttering, hoping, fearing, dreaming, dreading, waiting, human life, — what but this, which is the Incarnation truth, that God from whom this life came is always close to it, that He is always doing what He can do for it, even when men do not see Him, and that He cannot do for them all His love would do only because of the veil that hangs between Him and them? “Not far from every one of us!” — there is the secret of our life — weak and wicked because we will not live with God; restless, unable to be at peace in our weakness and wickedness, because God is not far from us.

But it is time for us to take this idea of God very near us, and giving Himself to all of us just as fully as we will receive Him, and follow it out more in detail. God is to men wisdom and comfort and spiritual salvation. See how our truth applies to each of these.

I. And first about God’s wisdom. I can conceive of a humanity which, up to the limits of its human powers, should understand God. No cloud should come in anywhere. It should know everything about Him which it was within the range of its nature to comprehend. Then I can conceive of another humanity which should not understand God at all, to which God should not even try to communicate Himself, which He should govern as He governs the unintelligent planets, without an effort to let them know His nature or His plans. Now which of these two is this humanity of ours? Certainly, neither of them. Certainly not the humanity which knows God perfectly, for see how ignorant we are! But certainly, upon the other hand, not the humanity that knows nothing of God; for behold how much we do know, how precious to our hearts is what we know of Him!

What then? I look back over all the history of man’s acquaintance with God, all the religions, all the theologies, and it seems to me to be all so plain. Here has been God forever desiring, forever trying, to give the knowledge of Himself to man. There has been never anything like playing with man’s mind, like leading men on to ask questions and then wilfully holding back the knowledge which men asked for; always God has been trying to make men understand Him. Never has He turned and gone away in anger, and left man in his ignorance. He has hovered about man’s mind with an unbroken presence. Wherever there was any chink, He has thrust in some knowledge of Himself. Thus man in every age, in every condition, even in his own despite, has learned that God is just, that God is merciful, that He governs the world in obedience to His own perfect nature, that He therefore must punish and that He must reward. These are not guesses about God which man has made. They are not beliefs about Him which men have reasoned out from their own natures. They are the truths about Himself which God has been able to press into the human understanding, even through every veil which man drew between himself and God.

I love to think of this; I love to think that there is no man so ignorant, so careless, so indifferent about what God is and what God is doing, that God is not all the time pressing upon that man’s life, and crowding into it all the knowledge of Himself that it will take. As the air crowds upon everything, upon the solidest and hardest stone, and on the softest and most porous earth, and into each presses what measure of itself each will receive; so God limits the revelation of Himself by nothing but by the capacity of every man to take and hold His revelation. This is not hard to understand or to believe. Into a roomful of people who differ in natural capacity and education, comes one man whose nature is rich, whom to know is itself a culture. The various people in the room do know him, all of them; but one knows him far more intimately, takes him far more deeply into his understanding, than another. All grades of knowledge about this newcomer are in that room, from almost total ignorance to almost perfect intimacy; but it is not that he has nicely discriminated and determined to whom he shall give himself, to whom he shall deny him self, and just how much he shall give himself to each. He has given the knowledge of himself just as bounteously to each, just as far into each, as he could.

I love to think that that is true of God. The blindest, dullest heathen is pressed upon by that same knowledge of God, eager to give itself away, that presses on the wisest saint. The heathen does not wait till our missionary comes to him. You are not kept waiting until all your doubts are settled and your fogs dispersed. At this moment, on every soul in this wide world, God is shedding that degree of the knowledge of Himself which the condition of that soul will allow. Is not that where what we call the false religions come from? They are imperfect religions. If they are religions at all, as indeed they are, it is because of what they know of God. Our missionaries must go to them with our religion as the elder brother goes to the younger brother, speaking of the father, of whom they both know something, out of the fuller knowledge which has come to him, but with sincere respect and reverence for all that his brother has been able to learn already.

Remember, God is teaching you always just as much truth as you can learn. If you are in sorrow at your ignorance then, still you must not despair. Be capable of more knowledge and it shall be given to you. What hinders you from knowing God perfectly is not God’s unwillingness but your imperfectness. Grow better and purer, and diviner wisdom shall come to you, not given as wages, as reward, but simply admitted into a nature grown more capable of receiving it. Here is our old text again: ‘’If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.” Here is Christ’s old promise again: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man will open unto me, I will come in and sup with him.”

2. But see again how true our truth is when we think of God as the giver not of wisdom, but of comfort. Two men are in deep suffering; the same great woe has fallen upon each of them. They need, with their poor bruised and mangled souls, they both need some healing, some strength which they cannot make for themselves. What is the reason that one of them seems to get it and the other fails? Why is it that one lifts up his head and goes looking at the stars, while the other bends and stoops, and goes with his eyes upon the ground? Is one God’s favorite more than the other? Is God near to one and far off from the other? We dream such unhealthy dreams! We fancy such unreal discriminations and favoritisms! We think that one soul is held in the great warm hands, while the other is cast out on the cold ground! But then comes in our truth: “He is not far from every one of us.” From every one of us! The difference, then, cannot be in God and in His willingness; it must be in the souls.

What, then, can we say to any soul that seems to be left comfortless when other souls all around it are gathering in comfort plentifully? There are two things that we may say, I think; and oh, that I could say them to any of your souls that need them! The first is this: God is comforting and helping you even when you do not know it. Do not let yourself imagine for a moment that God’s help to you is limited by what you can feel and recognize. Here is a man upon whom one of the great blows of life has fallen. He is not embittered by it. He is not proud and sullen. He goes to God and knows that his only help is in Him. He goes away and comes back to the same mercy seat, and goes away and comes again; and always he seems to himself to be carrying his whole burden. He cannot feel it grow any lighter on his shoulders.

But all the time he goes about his work. He does his duty. He will not let his sorrow break down his conscience. Do not I know something about that man which he does not know about himself? Do not I know that God is helping him when he thinks himself most unhelped? Do not I know that his burden is a very different thing from what it would be to him if there were no God? Believe and remember that, I beseech you, about your own suffering. If you are really looking to God for help, He is sending you help although you do not know it. Believe it also about your temptation. If you are really asking strength, He is giving you strength, although you do not feel it. Feeling is not the test. Your soul is feeding on it, though your eyes may not see it, any more than they can see the sweet and wholesome air by which you live.

And then, when this is said; and when there still remains the evident difference in the nearness of two men’s souls to God which this cannot explain; remember then that the difference must be in the men. In something that you are, not in anything that God is, must be the secret of the darkness of your soul. Do not let yourself for one moment think or feel that God has turned His back upon you, that He has gone away from you and left you to your fate. Don’t ask yourself, if He had, who are you that you should call Him back? Who is He that He should turn round at your calling? That way lies despair. No, “He is not far from every one of us.” He is not far from you. It is you that must turn to Him; and when you turn His light is already shining full upon you. What a great truth it is, how full of courage, this truth that man may go away from God, but God cannot go away from manl How God loves His own great character of faithfulness! He cannot turn His back upon His child. If His face is not shining upon you, it must be that your back is turned on Him. And if you have turned away from Him, you can turn back to Him again. That is the courage which always comes to one who takes all the blame of life upon himself, and does not cast it upon God. In humility there is always comfort and strength.

3. But we must not stop here. Where is the God who brings the spiritual salvation, who makes a man know his sin, and gives him the blessing of forgiveness and the peace of the new life? Is He, too, near to every man, ready to help, always trying to help all men to be deeply and spiritually good? This, it seems to me, is what a great many men find it harder to believe than they do that the God of wisdom or comfort is near His children. Many men believe that they can understand God and lay claim to His consolations, who seem to hold that His spiritual presence, the softening, elevating, purifying power of His grace, belongs to certain men only. Indeed, is it not the growing heresy of our time that what we call the Christian character, the beauty of self-sacrifice, devotion, spiritual duty, is possible for some men, but for other men, perhaps for most men, is impossible? That Christian character is not denied; its charm is felt. But it seems to belong to certain constitutions, and to be quite out of the power of others.

Ah, how the human mind swings back forever to a few first ideas, and holds them in some new form in each new age, but does not get beyond them! This feeling about the few men who are supposed to be capable of Christian experience is but the naturalistic statement, in a naturalistic age, of the same idea which in a legal and governmental age was stated as the doctrine of election. The man who, two hundred years ago, would have seen his brethren around him coming to Christ, and have sat down in submissive or sullen misery, saying, “Well, there is no chance for me. Others are called, but I am non-elect,” — that same man now, catching the tone of the age, looks round upon the praying and believing multitude, and says more or less sadly, but with no more real self-reproach than the soul which recognized its reprobation: “Religion is a thing of temperament, and I am non-religious.” Against them both, protesting that both are false and shallow views of this solemn human life of ours, — against them both, whether souls are hiding in them as excuses, or crushed under them as burdens, there stands the everlasting simple Bible truth of the universal nearness of God: “He is not far from every one of us.”

And just as soon as men really get below the surface, and have broken through the superficial look and current theories of things, and really have come to real study of their own spiritual lives, I believe that it is absolutely true that they always find that there is nothing which so meets the story of their lives, nothing which can so explain themselves to themselves, as this; which you may call at first an hypothesis if you will, but which verifies itself to us as all hypotheses must verify themselves, by the way in which it meets the facts which have to be explained; the hypothesis of God present with and always trying to work upon our souls, to make them good, pure, strong, true, brave; unseen by us, but always close to us; and, because He is God, always working, always hindered by our ignorance, our obstinacy, our wickedness, but never discouraged, never turning away, doing all that .omnipotent Love can do upon unwilling human souls to make them live to Him.

If that were true, what would our life be? Think it out; think how a being would live, how he would feel, that was thus ever touched and pressed upon by a God he did not see, trying to persuade him to holiness, trying to convince him of sin; and then run back over the life you have been living ever since you can remember, and tell me if they do not perfectly match and coincide. Restless, self-accusing, dreaming of goodness which you never reached; fitfully trying tasks which all your old experience told you were impossible; haunted by wishes which you dared to laugh at, but did not dare to chase away; with two sets of standards about right and wrong, one which you kept for the world, the other which you hid deep in your heart and were more than half ashamed of; — what does all that correspond to but the life that a man must live who is surrounded and pressed upon by an unseen God? God-haunted our lives are, until they give them selves to God, as the brain of a sleeper is haunted by the daylight until he opens his eyes and gives himself a willing servant to the morning.

Or a beast lies tangled in a net. Some kind hands try to unsnarl the cords and let him go. The creature feels them tugging at the strings, and writhes and struggles all the more, and twists himself into a yet more inextricable snarl. But by and by he catches in his dull soul the meaning of the tugs and pulls that he feels, and he enters into sympathy with his deliverers. He lies still while they unbind him, or he moves only so as to help their efforts, and so at last he is free. That is the way in which God sets a soul free from its sins. And therein the soul freed from its sins sees the explanation of all its struggles which have gone before.

This, then, is the story of the present God. What is the meaning of the Incarnation? We picture Christ coming from far, down through the ranks of angels, down from the battlements of heaven; far, far beyond the sun we picture Him leaving His eternal seat and “coming down” to save the world. Then we picture Christ’s departure. Back by the way He came, beyond the sun again, once more through the shining hosts, until He takes His everlasting seat at the right hand of God. There is truth in such pictures. But have we not caught more of the spirit of the Incarnation if we think of it, not as the bringing to us of a God who had been far away, but as the showing to us of a God who had been hidden? It is as if the cloud parted and the tired and thirsty traveller saw by his side a brook of clear, sweet water, running along close by the road he travelled. Then the cloud closed again, but the traveller who had once seen the brook never could be faint with thirst again. He must always know where to find it and drink of it. Christ was not a God coming out of absence. He was the ever-present God, revealing how near He always was.

And so of the new life of Christ in man. It is not something strange and foreign, brought from far away. It is the deepest possibility of man, revealed and made actual. When you stand at last complete in Christ, it is not some rare adornments which He has lent from His Divinity to clothe your humanity with. Those graces are the signs of your humanity. They are the flower of your human life, drawn out into luxuriance by the sunlight of the divine Love. You take them as your own, and “wear them as the angels wear their wings.”

This is what Belief means, then. Not the far-off search for a distant God, but the turning, the looking, the trusting, to a God who has been always present, who is present now. This is what Belief means. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”