The Preacher Among the Mysteries
He limits of our knowledge, it behooves all of us to get clearly in mind. I desire now to add some suggestions to fellow-students of the Word, as to ivJiat we do not know, and it must be admitted that there is a great deal included under that head.
In the first place there is much that we are not intended to know. Deut. xxix. 29, tells us that “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but the things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” There are certain things that so far belong unto God and always will belong unto Him, as that they will always remain secret. If God made any attempt to reveal them to us, we should not have the capacity and receptivity for them; but there are other things which are revealed, and they
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belong to us and to our children. These are all the words of His law. His commandments are clear and plain, and it is with those that we have principally to do.
Now note the singular silences of Scripture. The inspiration of the Word of God is seen not only in what is openly declared, but in what is not said. For example, there is no hint given in the Word of God as to when the age of moral responsibility begins in children. Truth is not announced which belongs to the department of pure science. Petty rules are not given to us for our daily conduct, constituting a sort of a manual for the control of the little details of life, but we are left to great general principles that we may make our personal application of them and learn independence, by using reason and conscience. We are not told what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was; otherwise, those only might get comfort out of his experience who had a similar thorn: as it is, we can all find help in God’s dealing with him. What absolute silence is preserved with regard to the future body of the wicked in the ressurection! We have the barest hints as to any original form of Church polity, and even those are so vague and general that they accommodate themselves with amazing flexibility to the various systems of church conduct. Nothing is said about the personal features of our Lord Jesus Christ, the color of His eyes, His hair, His height and form. The exact time of Christ’s coming is not declared, or the end of the age. There is no pronunciamento vvitli regard to different forms of worldly amusements; the limits of propriety are set upon great general principles. Whether any of the heathen are to be saved without the knowledge of the historical Christ and on what principles such might be saved; these and other things are left without expressed teaching and declaration; and a discriminating mind will see how infinite wisdom guided in silence as well as in speech. Swedenborg knew nothing o*.’ the principle which is at the bottom of the solemn reserve of the Bible. He wrote forty times as much as both the Old and the New Testaments contain, telling who are in heaven and who are in hell, and endeavoring to make up for the deficiency of Holy Scripture by supplying us with conceptions of how souls in the future life spend their time and occupy themselves. We find in his works an illustration of the famous maxim, that nothing that is new is true, and nothing that is true is new. His visions abound in the novelties of spiritualism and the speculations of an irreverent science and a dreamy philosophy. So far as he has sought to fill up the gaps of Scripture he has only made the whole subject ridiculous, furnishing a great lesson for all who seek to supply speech where the Bible keeps silence.
Secondly, note the absence of attempts to reconcile paradoxes in Holy Scripture, both sides of seemingly antagonistic truth being boldly and sometimes almost severely stated; such as Divine sovereignty and human freedom; such as the privilege of individual prayer and yet the unchangeable counsels of Almighty God; such as the trinity of the persons of the Godhead, and the unit)’ of the nature of the Godhead; such as human inability in the direction of moral and spiritual life, and yet responsibility before Almighty God. These paradoxes result not from any absolute antagonism of truth with truth, but from the infiniteness of the Divine mind, and the grandeur of the distance between God and man, so that what appears to be a paradox seems such
PREACHER AMOXG THE MYSTERIES. (>3
only because of the limits of human thought and comprehension.
Thirdly, there is in us incapacity to understand the deep things of God. Coleridge has long since drawn the distinction between “comprehension” and “apprehension.” In I Cor. ii. II Paul declares, that “no man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of a man which is in him; even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.” TRe argument is that only the spirit of the man is absolutely master of the man’s mind and thoughts; and as only the spirit of the man understands the man, comprehends him, so only the Spirit of God can understand the things of God. An external observer cannot read perfectly the Divine mind. For man to understand God would imply equality with God, as for one man to understand perfectly and absolutely the product of another’s genius implies a genius equal to the other. The very fact, of the handiwork or product of another’s brain or skill being beyond me, shows his superiority to me in that direction. Therefore, even the apparent contradictions of truth in the Word of God may be the indications of a higher mind. These contradictions result from the lower point of observation and the lower measure of capacity. There is, for instance, in mathematics, a well-known proposition called “the asymptote of the h-pcrbola,” and in connection with this it is shown that a line may indefinitely be extended and continually approach another line and yet never touch it; because a line does not represent breadth but only distance between two points, and, as the distance between these lines is constantly divided by one half, no extension of the lines will cause them to touch. This, to a boy studying the rudiments of arithmetic, is absolutely incomprehensible and contradictory, but to the mature mathematician it is the demonstration of a fact. The same truth may be put into a more comprehensible form, however, but on a lower level. Here is a son, whose age represents one-half of the age of his father, he being twenty years of age and his father forty. Now when that son is fort)- and his father sixty the difference in age will be represented not by one-half but by one-third. When he is sixty and his father eighty it will be represented by one-fourth. When he is eighty and his father one hundred it will be represented by one-fifth.
And so this fraction of difference will continually diminish, but will never become nothing. This illustrates how higher truth, that may now appear paradoxical and contradictory, if it could be put before us in such a form as to be apprehensible and even comprehensible, would be seen to be nevertheless accurate and consistent.
Fourthly, our present experience unfits us to interpret the great things of God. There are things that can be understood only by the interpretation of an enlarged experience. When Robert Moffat, in mission tours in southern Africa moved upward among the tribes that had no contact with civilization, he rode in an ox-wagon and took with him a steam kettle, both of which w?¥^e absolute novelties to them. He told them that in his own country they laid down lines of steel and on them drew many ox-wagons with a great steam kettle at the head of them. That was his way of describing a train of cars and locomotive, by objects which they had seen. When he set up his tent and from his lantern threw on the canvas an image of a train of cars in motion, they said “Oh, see there! the ox-wagons and the steam kettle!” When he came to England and brought with (>(> THE DIl’IXE AKT OF rREACHhXG.
him the son of a chief, and they stepped into a train at Southampton, the young lad said, “This is the train of wagons with the steam kettle.” There are natural limits of revelation. God has to use in the description of heaven a nomenclature that is drawn from the experience of earth; to use terms only applicable to heavenly things would be to make Himself unintelligible to man. There are limits to revelation, found, not in the power of God to declare, but in the power of man to understand. As therefore experience grows in spiritual things, so will spiritual apprehension grow. This is what Paul means when in i Cor., second chapter, he says, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hc-^ entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” There are things that never could have been understood until the Spirit of God taught inwardly and by experience; but under such guidance all Divine things become apprehensible, and in a measure comprehensible, in the course of a growing spiritual knowledge of God.
Fifthly, we should therefore find out the practical limits of knowledge and be content to abide within them. The Rev. James A. Spurgeon has told me a good story of a blind horse, put into a new pasture. The master watched him until he became familiar with the limits of the new territory. The horse walked along the pasture in one direction until he came into contact with a brick wall against which he struck his head. He then turned about and went in the other direction until he came to a ditch, into which he stepped; but from that time forth he never again struck the brick wall or got into the ditch. He had found out the actual practical limits of his pasture, and he kept within them. It might be well if some men would learn as much as that blind horse learned. I add a few further suggestions: {a) We must distinguish between speculative and practical truth. A Glasgow professor has finely said that all our modern science does not adequately account for the bowlder in geology; but the bowlder is a fact; and our science must be made to accommodate itself to the fact. We cannot deny the bowlder. So the Sermon on the Mount, the fifteenth chapter of Luke, and the eighth
68 THE DIVIh’E ART OF PREACHING.
chapter of Romans, and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah are bowlders. Their existence cannot be denied, and our speculative thinking must somehow adjust itself to the existence of these great undeniable spiritual facts.
{U) Our knowledge is mainly of importance as it concerns our witness. And hence, we do not need to know anything which docs not somehow concern our experimental life and our practical testimony. Beyond this, knowledge might gratify curiosity, but it could not help service. If we eat of the Tree of Life, it matters comparatively little that we should not eat fully of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
{c) Our preaching should tlicrefore be absolutely confined to topics with regard to which we have some experimental and practical acquaintance. As Christ said, so should every preacher say, “We speak that we do know.” How grand it would be for the Church and the world if modern preachers would absolutely confine themselves to what they know! It is not negations but positions that the world, wants; it is not doubts and intellectual difficulties that assist us, of which we have fully enough of our own; it is certainties and verities. Let men tell us what in their spiritual life and outer practical life they have tried, tested, tasted. These things can be of value to us, but all their doubts and misgivings can only be snares. My resolve, at the outset of my minstry, was that I would never preach on any subject in which God did not give me in my own inner life some special illumination. Such a resolve may narrow down” a man’s testimony, but it will make it all testimony; and, as one’s experience grows, just so will his witness increase both in extensity and intensity. We need this personal element in preaching, which perhaps makes on men more impression, and carries with it more conviction, than anything else.
{d) Hence it follows that we should never make our doubts public, for it is plain that the only effect is to make doubters and skeptics. We advertise and give currency to objections and obstacles to faith instead of helping feeble faith to grow stronger.
{e) Again, it is always easier to suggest a difficulty than to furnish its solution. Says Archbishop Whately,” Any fool can ask more questions than any wise man can answer; but no wise man can ask a question
70 THE niVnVE ART OF PRE A CHIANG.
that he will not find some fool ready to attempt to answer.” Many a sermon which has ambitiously attempted the demonstration of great truths, such as the existence of God, has resulted only in planting objections and doubts in the minds of hearers. A comical story is told of a man who preached a sermon on modern atheism and thought he had demolished the positions of the atheists entirely. A simple old believer who was going out of the church was asked how she liked the sermon. Well, she said, she supposed it was a splendid sermon, but, notwithstanding all the speaker said, she did still believe in the existence of God! She had heard and caught the objections, but had not felt the force of the demonstration.
(/) ^’Ve repeat that only our certainties help others. Faith has been compared to a bee on a flower sucking honey from the nectaries; Reason, to the spider spinning a web out of its own bowels, on which it may itself walk with some safety, but in which the flies get hopelessly entangled. Tell people what you know, if you want to help them to larger knowledge; keep your uncertainties to yourself until by God’s grace they are exchanged for certainties.