A Personal God
Our subject this morning is The God of the Bible: A Personal God. I have three texts. You will find the first in Jno. 17:3:
“This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”
You will find the second in I Jno. 5:20, 21:
“And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols.”
You will find the third in Jno. 20:28:
“Thomas answered and said unto Him, My
Lord and my GodT
It is of immeasurable importance that men know God, that they know “the true God.” To know “the true God” is, as the first of our texts declares, “eternal life.” Not to know “the true God” is eternal death and darkness. No other knowledge is of such importance as the knowledge of God. We are having
IS
our children taught to-day in our schools, and col¬ leges, and universities a little of pretty much every form of knowledge except the one all-important knowledge, the knowledge of God. It is not permitted in our public schools in California that we teach the Bible, which is the only book in which God has fully revealed Himself, or that we teach them the divine origin and infallibility and matchless value of the Bible. But the teachers in our public schools are permitted to teach our children, and do teach them, a crass and ill-digested evolutionism, that as a matter of demonstrated fact undermines their faith in the Bible, and they are also permitted to teach them in Biblical Criticism what are called “the assured results of modern Scholarship” but what in actual fact are nothing of the kind, but are rather the wild and exploded theories of Wellhausen and Grafe and Kuenen, the very views of the Bible that robbed the civil rulers and army officers of Germany, of their faith in the God of the Bible and resulted in the late war with all its “frightfulness” and the awful havoc that it wrought throughout the whole world. And already the exclusion of the Bible from our schools, and these views of the Bible taught in our schools and the views of God to which the ill-digested evolutionism taught in our schools has led the child, are undermining the morals of our boys and girls in our schools and work¬ ing such a carnival of youthful lust, and impurity, and recklessness, and falsehood, and dishonesty, and Bol¬ shevism among the rising generation as is appalling, and the more appalling the more one knows the facts regarding some of our schools.
Very little of a definite and thorough character is taught about God even in many of our churches. In¬ deed in certain silly circles there is a great outcry against all doctrinal preaching. By many our churches are simply regarded as convenient places in which to exploit the various issues of the day and to raise funds for schools, hospitals, the destitute, and all manner of other objects, good, bad, and indifferent. No! This is the important thing for us all to know and for our preachers to preach, the full truth about God, as He has revealed Himself in the Bible and in His Son Jesus Christ.
This address is the first of a series of addresses on “The God of the Bible.’^ The God of the Bible is not the God of much of our so-called “Modern Thinking,*^ which is not modern at all but a revamping of the old and discarded pantheism of centuries gone by. The “God of the Bible” is not the god of “Christian Science” or of “New Thought” or of “Theosophy” or of “Spiritualism” or of “Unitarianism” or of “The New Theology” or of “Modern Philosophy” or of “Modernism” in general, or of any of the many and ever-multiplying unbiblical cults of the day in which we live. So the full title of the series of sermons is. The God of the Bible as distinguished from the God of “Theosophy,” the God of “Christian Science,” the God of “New Thought,” the God of “Spiritualism,” the God of “Unitarianism,” the God of “The New Theology,” the God of “Modern Philosophy,” and the God of “Modernism” in general, and of the many ever-multiplying unbiblical cults of the day.
The particular subject of our first sermon, the sermon of this morning, is The God of the Bible: A Personal God. We shall see as we proceed that the god of Christian Science and some of these other cults and the god that is taught in some of our supposedly orthodox theological seminaries, is not a personal God.
/. What Does the Word “Personal” Mean When Applied to God?
In the first place then let us find what the word “Personal” means when applied to God, or when accurately used in other connections. What is a per¬ son? The marks of personality are knowledge, feel¬ ing and will. Any being who knows and feels and wills is a person, whether he is visible or invisible, whether he has a body or has not a body. Many people think when you say “God is a Person” that you mean God has hands and feet and eyes and ears and so on. But having hands and feet and eyes and ears and so on, or in general having a body, is not the mark of Personality but of Corporeity, which is an entirely different matter. Whether or not God has a body or a visible form we will consider at some later day, but that has nothing to do with God’s being or not being a Person.
If the Lord tarries and you and I pass through the experience of what men call death before He comes, we will pass out of this present dwelling place, i. e., this present body, and “depart to be with Christ,” and we shall not get our resurrection bodies until He comes again; but we shall not cease to be persons, we shall ‘depart to be with Christ,” and we shall think and feel, and we shall know great joy, for ‘‘it is very far better” (Phil. 1:23) to leave the body and be with Him. We shall, as Paul puts it in another place, be “‘absent from the body, and at home with the Lord” (II Cor. 5:8). It is clear then that personality is one thing, and that having a body is an entirely different thing.
It is one of the most common errors of our day to confuse Personality with Corporeity. I am inclined to think that when Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy denied so emphatically as she did the Personality of God, she was thinking of Corporeity. In fact in the immediately preceding paragraph of “Science and Health,” she says: “Christian Science strongly designates the thought that God is not corporeal but incorporeal, — that is bodiless. Mortals are corporeal but God is incorporeal” (italics Mrs. Eddy’s). It would not be a thing to be wondered at or surprised at if Mrs. Eddy had been thus confused in her thought; for in her writings, especially her earlier writings, before some person or persons who had a more accurate knowledge of the meaning of English words than she possessed corrected them, she displayed an amazing ignorance, not only of the facts of science and religion but also of the meaning of words, except as she had caught some glimpses of things from her study of Dr. Quimby’s writings, which she so unblushingly borrowed and failed to return, and of which she ultimately refused to acknowledge the ownership. It is true that she writes in this connection, “As the words Person and Personal are commonly and ignorantly employed, they often lead, when applied to Deity, to confused and erroneous conceptions of divinity, and its distinction from humanity,’’ but she goes on with words that seem to indicate confusion in her own mind as to the distinction between corporeity and personality. But however that may be, she certainly did obscure the great truth of ‘‘the Personality of God” all through her writings. She constantly taught that God was a mere abstraction. She taught not only that God is love (which is true, if we properly understand the meaning of the words, which she did not), but she also taught that “Love is God,” which is not true. Her teachings, carried out to their logical conclusion, lead to the radically false and utterly damnable and hopelessly damning thought that “God is us (all of us)” and “we are God” (not gods but God). Mrs. Eddy says in this very connection, speaking of the Personality of God, “If the term personality, as applied to God, means infinite personality, then God is personal Being — in this sense but not in the lower sense) “Science and Health,” 69th Edition, p. 10). You will notice that she says, “God is personal Being,” that is, of course, only an abstract Being in general. She does not say, “God is a Personal Being,” that is, a definite Person, separate and distinct from other persons, all of whom He has created. In the next sentence she says “An Infinite mind and a finite form do not, cannot coalesce.” Here is another illustration of her dense ignorance of the meaning of words. No one, even though he believes most strongly that God has a form, thinks that He and His form ‘’coalesce,” he thinks they co-exist. It is unfortunate that Mrs. Eddy did not have a good dictionary and study it more assiduously. The correct definition of “coalesce, ’’ given in one of the most recently published dictionaries, and one of the most re¬ liable, The Desk Standard Dictionary, is, “to grow or come together into one; fuse, blend.” Now, no one who believes that God has an outward form in which He manifests Himself, thinks that He Himself, an intelligent, thinking, willing, determining Personality, “grows together into one” with the form He inhabits, or “fuses” with it, or “blends” with it.
But Mrs. Eddy is not the only prominent teacher who denies the Personality of God. Professors of theology in our universities and seminaries do it also. The late Professor Walter Rauschenbush of the Baptist Theological Seminary at Rochester, N. Y., the chief apostle of what is now so much exploited as “The Social Gospel,” says in his book, “A Theology for the Social Gospel,” page 178, “The old conception that God... u distinct from our human life’’ must give way to “the religious belief that He is immanent in humanity.” Professor Gerald Birney Smith, Professor of Christian Theology at Chicago University writes, “The worship of God in a democracy will consist in reverence for those human values which democracy makes supreme” (“Man and the New Democracy,” page 94). The natural, indeed the inevitable inference is, if Professor G. Birney Smith has any accurate knowledge of the meaning of words, that God is “those human values which democracy makes supreme.” In another place he speaks of God as, “the spiritual forces of the world in which we live” (“A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion,”
page 537). In the light of this definition he might better have called his book a guide to the study of Buddhism or Theosophy. Again in the same book on page 51 1 he speaks of God as “the unseen forces of the universe.” R. G. Campbell, who was at one time the most outstanding exponent of “The New Theology” in England but afterwards in a measure at least recanted, said, ‘’God is my deeper self and yours too; he is the self of the universe” President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University sets forth the opinion that “God is the truth, virtue, beauty of man.” President Hall goes on to say that the only real atheist is he “who denies these attributes to man” (“Jesus the Christ, in the Light of Psychology,” Vol. I, p. 285). Professor Hall also says that prayer is “communion with the deeper racial self within us.” The late Professor Royce of Harvard University spoke of God as the immanent “spirit of the community” {The Amercian Journal of Theology, 1913, p. 638). It would be easy to multiply quotations from Professors of Theology in Theological Seminaries and Universities that present similar pantheistic definitions of an impersonal God, but let us turn from all this skillfully phrased foolish¬ ness to the lofty revelation of God as He really is set forth in God’s own Word, the Bible.
IL The Personality of God as Set Forth in the Bible
From the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation we see God as a Person, an infinite and perfect Person, not a mere force, or abstract intelligence, or “the absolute,” but an infinitely wise, infinitely holy, and infinitely loving Person, ‘‘Our Father in Heaven,” as our Lord Jesus spoke of Him and to Him (Matt. 6: 9).
I will not stop here to show that knowledge, feeling and will are all ascribed to God in the Bible over and over again. All of us who know our Bible at all well know that the knowledge and love and supreme will of God appear on nearly every page, and we will take all these things up in detail in some future studies when we consider the Omniscience of God, the Holiness of God, the Love of God and the Sovereignty of God.
I. In the first place, The Bible reveals God as a living God. Read Jer. 10: 10-16 (R. V.).
“But Jehovah is the true God; He is the living God, and an everlasting King: at His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are not able to abide His indignation. Thus shall ye say unto them, The Gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, these shall perish from the earth, and from under the heavens. He hath made the earth by His power. He hath established the world by His wisdom, and by His understanding hath he stretched out the heavens. When He uttereth His voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens, and He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings for the rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of His treasuries. Every man is become brutish and is without knowledge; every gold¬ smith is put to shame by his graven image; for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. They are vanity, a work of delusion: in the time of their visitation they shall perish. The portion of Jacob is not like these; for he is the former of all things; and Israel is the tribe of his inheritance: Jehovah of hosts is His name.”
In this sublimely eloquent passage, so strikingly in contrast to the vapid word spinning of the supposedly scholarly and brilliant seminary and university professors whom we have been quoting, God is distinguished from the idols, the gods men make for them¬ selves which are things, not persons, things which ‘‘speak not,” “cannot go,” “cannot do evil,” “neither is it in them to do good” (see Jer. 10: 5, 8, 9). In contrast with them Jehovah is wiser than “all the wise men,” He is “the living God,” “an everlasting King,” a Being who has “wrath and indignation,” and who is separate and apart from all the persons and things which He Himself has created. “At His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are not able to abide His indignation.” The idols men form to-day and call “God” are not made with their hands, as in Jeremiah’s day, from “the stock” of “the palm tree” and “decked with silver and gold”: they are made with their bewildered and addled brains out of the tenuous filaments of their own auto-intoxicated musings (as we have seen in the fatuous quotations given above), but they are idols just the same, and they are not “the only true God,” the God of the Bible.
In this quotation from the prophet Jeremiah, who lived and wrote six hundred years before Christ, we are in the realm of the sublime. In these quotations from these great and brilliant “Modern Scholars,” who lived nineteen hundred years after Christ, we are in the realm of the ridiculous. How came this man who lived twenty-five hundred years ago to utter such marvelous wisdom in such striking contrast to the inane nonsense of these bright and learned and “scholarly” thinkers of to-day? There can be but one rational answer to that question; and that answer is, The infinitely wise God spoke through him; while these modern theologians, discounting the Word of God and chasing the butterflies of “modern scholarship” and “modern [pantheistic] philosophy” and self-confident metaphysics, “professing themselves to be wise, became fools” (Rom. 1:22). We all do well when we imitate the early converts in Thessalonica and “turn to God from (all these disgusting) idols to serve the living and true God,” and also to wait for His Son from Heaven” (I Thess. i: 19).
2. In the second place, God is revealed in the Bible as having a present interest in and an active hand in the affairs of men. We read in Josh. 3:10:
“And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that He will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Hivite, and the Perizzite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Jebusite.”
We read in Dan. 6: 20-22, 26, 27:
“And when he came near unto the den to Daniel, he cried with a lamentable voice; the king spake and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions? Then said Daniel unto the King, O King, live forever. My God hath sent His angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not hurt me; forasmuch as before Him innocency was found in me; and also be¬ fore thee, O King, have I done no hurt.... I make a decree, that in all the dominion of my kingdom men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel; for He is the living God, and steadfast forever, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed; and His dominion shall be even unto the end. He delivereth and rescuethj and He worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth. Who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.”
And we read in Heb. lo: 28-31:
‘‘For we know Him that said. Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense. And again. The Lord shall judge His people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
And we read in Rom. 8:28-31, R.V.:
“And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew. He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first born among many brethren: and whom He foreordained, them He also called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?”
And in Phil. 4: 19 we read:
“And my God shall supply every need of yours according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”
We see then that “the God of the Bible” is not only to be distinguished from the god of Pantheism who has no existence whatever separate from his creation, but also from the God of the Deist, Who has created a world and put into it all the necessary powers of self-action and development and, having set it going, leaves it to go of itself. The God of the Bible is a God who has a personal, active, and present interest in the affairs of the universe to-day.
One of the most distinctive and outstanding features of the so-called “New Theology” and of “the Higher Criticism” is that it scoffs at the miraculous, the super¬ natural, at the idea of God taking at the present time, or in Bible times, any active and immediate hand in the affairs of man. Many of us know by glad and glorious experience that the Bible conception is the true conception and that the conception of “Modern Scholarship” runs up against the stone wall of the established facts of history and the facts of our own personal experience.
3. In the third place, God is revealed in the Bible as the Creator of all existing things, animate and in¬ animate, earthly and celestial. The very first words we read in the Bible, opening the sublime epic of creation found in the first chapter of Genesis, are, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and in the N. T. counterpart to this passage we read in Jno. 1:1-3:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him; and with¬ out him was not anything made that hath been made.’’
In Col. 1: 16 we read:
“For in him [that is in Jesus Christ] were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him.”
This all is in marked contrast to the god who is left to us by the crass and scientifically and historically disproven evolutionism that so strangely dominates our universities, theological seminaries, high schools, and private schools. When you ask them for some substantial proof of their theory, they reply, “All scholars are agreed upon it,” but when you ask them what about this scholar or that they reply, “Oh, he doesn’t believe in Evolution, therefore he is not a scholar.” It reminds me of a talk I had some years ago with a student in Edinburgh University. He had remarked to me that all the great Semitic scholars belonged to the destructive school of Biblical Criticism. I asked him what about Professor Margoliouth (at that time perhaps the greatest Semitic scholar in England). “Is he a scholar?” this young man asked me. I replied, “He was so considered until he left the radical side and came over to the conservative side.’^ The student smiled and admitted that it was so.
4. In the fourth place, The Bible reveals God as sustaining, governing, and caring for the world He has created, and as shaping the whole present history of the world. We read in Ps. 104: 27-30:
“These wait all for thee,
That thou mayest give them their food in
due season.
Thou givest unto them, they gather;
Thou openest thy hand, they are satisfied
with good.
Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled;
Thou takest away their breath, they die.
And return to their dust.
Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are
created;
And thou renewest the face of the ground.’’ We read again in Isa. 45: 5-7:
“I am Jehovah, and there is none else; beside me there is no God. I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me; that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me: I am Jehovah, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am Jehovah, that doeth all these things.’* Where in all the literature of the “modernists,” or any other literature except the Bible, can we find any¬ thing that approaches the sublimity of both of these passages? (Let me say in passing in regard to the passage in Isaiah where Jehovah says, “I create evil,” the word here translated “evil” does not mean moral evil but natural evil, and by the context we see in this ‘T particular case it means “unrest and trouble” as cony trasted with “peace”). We read again in Ps. 76: 6, 7:
“At thy rebuke, O God of Jacob,
Both chariot and horse are cast into a dead sleep.
Thou, even thou, art to be feared;
And who may stand in thy sight when once
thou art angry?”
5. In the fifth place, God is revealed in the Bible as One Whose care and government extend to all His creatures, even the smallest and the most insignificant. We read in Matt. 6:26, 28-30:
“Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they?... And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to¬ day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”
And we read in Matt. 10:29, 30:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? and not one of them shall fall to the ground without your Father: but the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
6. In the sixth place, God is revealed in the Bible as One Whose care and ministry and government ex¬ tend to the individual. Way back in Genesis, the book in which are the seeds from which the whole vast tree of Bible truth would grow, we read:
‘‘But Jehovah was with Joseph, and showed kindness unto him, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison” (Gen. 39: 21 R. V.).
And in Dan. i: 9 we read:
“Now God made Daniel to find kindness and compassion in the sight of the prince of the eunuchs.”
And in I Kings 19: 5-7, we read of God’s own ten¬ der and personal ministries to His discouraged prophet:
“And he lay down and slept under a juniper-tree; and behold, an angel touched him, and said unto him. Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was at his head a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. And the angel of Jehovah came again the second time, and touched him, and said. Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for thee.”
7. In the seventh place, God is revealed in the Bible as One Whose control and government extend to the wicked designs and devices and doings of evil men and even of Satan himself and as One who makes the seeming evil work out to His own glory and His peopie’s good. Listen to these words written more than twenty-five hundred years ago, Ps. 76:10: ‘‘Surely the zvrath of man shall praise thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain.” And read these words written in the first book in the Bible, which our “modern scholars” affect so much to despise, but to whose lofty heights they have not yet climbed even the foot¬ hills, Gen. 50:20: “And as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Read also these words in the second book in the Bible, Ex. 9: 16: “But in very deed for this cause have t made thee (the wicked Pharaoh) to stand, to show thee my power, and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.” Turn now to the N. T. and read Peter’s marvelously significant words on the day of Pentecost, Acts 2: 22, 23:
“Ye men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus’ of Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you by mighty works and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you, even as ye yourselves know; him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay.”
Now turn back to what many scholars regard as the earliest written book in the Bible, Job, Chapter 1:12 and 2:6:
“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of Jehovah.” “And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life.”
Here the Bible represents even Satan himself with all his malevolence carrying out the merciful purposes of God.
In Luke 22:3 we see the same thing, “And Satan entered into Judas who was called Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve,” and the result was that God’s eternal purpose of redeeming love was accomplished by the atoning death of Jesus Christ, which was brought to pass by the great enemy of God and man, the Devil.
Such is the God of the Bible, as far as the question of His Personality and His being a living God is concerned, a God who lives and loves and acts and works to-day. Oh, I am glad I have such a real, concrete, personal, living God, One in Whom I can trust and have no fears, whatever may arise, and not the im¬ personal, abstract, vague, vapory, elusive, unreal God of the rhetorical twaddle of Walter Rauschenbush, Professor G. Birney Smith, President G. Stanley Hall, Professor Royce, Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, and a host of other drowsy dreamers. With such a God I can face whatever calamity seems to threaten to overtake me and say, “I know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8: 28), and again, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31).
If any of you wish the god of “Christian Science” or the god of “New Thought” or the god of “Modern Scholarship” (falsely so-called), you can have it.
I would not give two cents for it. But give me the God of the Bible, the Real God, “the living and true God,” “the only true God,” Whom to know is not only “life eternal,” but boundless peace and overflowing joy every day.