God's Thoughts and Our Thoughts
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” — Is. Iv. 9.
On earth the words of a wise man often mean something different from what a hearer understands of them. How natural then that the words of God, as He understands them, mean something infinitely higher than we at once appre*hend.
There is very great need for remembering this. Doing so will lead us continually from resting content with our knowledge and thoughts of the Word, to wonder and wait what may be its full blessing as God has meant it. It will give our prayer for the Holy Spirit’s teaching new point and urgency, even to show us what has not yet entered into our heart to conceive. It will give confidence to the hope that there is for us, even in this life, a fulfilment beyond our highest thoughts.
God’s Word thus has two meanings. The one is that which it has in the mind of God, making the human words actually the bearer of all the glory of Divine wisdom, and power, and love. The other is our feeble, partial, defective apprehension of it. Even after grace and experience have made such words as the love of God, the grace 69 ‘JO The Inner Chamber
of God, the power of God, or any one of the many promises connected with these verities, very true and real to us, there is still an infinite fulness in the Word we have not yet known.
How strikingly this is put in our text from Isaiah. “As the heavens are higher than the earth.” Our faith in the fact is so simple and clear that no one would dream of trying with his little arm to reach the sun or the stars. To climb the highest mountain would not avail. We do with our whole heart believe it. And now God says, even so,” my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.^’ Even when the Word has spoken out God’s thoughts, and our thoughts have sought to take them in, they still remain, as high above our thoughts as the heavens are higher than the earth. All the infinities of God and the eternal world dwell in the Word as the seed of eternal life. And as the full-grown oak is so mysteriously greater than the acorn from which it sprang, so God’s words are but seeds from which God’s mighty wonders of grace and power can grow up.
Faith in this Word should teach us two lessons, the one of ignorance, the other of expectation. We should learn to come to the Word as little children. Jesus said, “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” The prudent and the wise are not necessarily hypocrites or enemies. There are many of God’s own dear children, who, by neglecting to cultivate continually a childlike spirit, and unconsciously resting on the scripturalness of their creed, or the honesty of their Scripture study, have spiritual truth hidden from them, and never become spiritual men. “Who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God. But we received the Spirit of God, that we might know!” Let a deep sense of our ignorance, a deep distrust of our own power of understanding the things of God even, mark our Bible study.
Then, the deeper our despair of entering aright into the thoughts of God, the greater the confidence of expectancy may be. God wants to make His Word true in us.” Thy children shall be taught of God.^’ The Holy Spirit is already in us to reveal the things of God. In answer to our humble believing prayer God will, through Him, give an evergrowing insight into the mystery of God — our wonderful union and likeness to Christ, His living in us, and our being as He was in this world.
Yea more — if our hearts thirst and wait for it, a time may come when, by a special communication of His Spirit, all our yearnings are satisfied and Christ so takes possession of the heart, that, what was long a faith becomes an experience, that as the heavens are higher than the earth His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.