Nineveh's Repentance: Its Nationality, Its Expressions, Its Efficacy
“For word came unto the king of Nineveh; and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything; let them not feed, nor drink water; but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God; yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in
their hands And God saw their works, that they turned from their
evil way; and God repented of the evil that He had said that He would do unto them; and He did it not.” — Jonah iii, 6-8, 10.
‘’’And Jehoshaphat feared, aid set himself to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah
“And all Judah stood before the Lord, with their little ones, their loives, and their children.” — 2 Chron. xx. 3, 13.
C’iER.TAIN circumstances connected with the repentance of J Nineveh are worthy of particular notice by themselves. We may notice first, the nationcditi, of it; and secondly, the
outward indications.
I. First, then, we may notice the nationality of this repentance. It was a public, general, royal fast. The king himself set the example. “For word came unto the king, and he rose from his throne, and laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.” And he did not merely countenance the proposal of a fast by his example; or counsel it by his advice. He commanded it by his authority. “He caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by decree of the king and his nobles.”
Of such fasts we have many examples in Scripture. When the children of Moab and the children of Ammon, reinforced by a heterogeneous multitude of the enemies of Judah, came against Jehoshaphat, we are told that on word being brought to him, the “king feared, and set himself to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah” (2 Chron. xx. 3). In like manner, in the days of Joel, we find the Lord calling for repentance, and enjoining a public fast: “Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly: gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the breasts: let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out of her closet. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say. Spare Thy people, O Lord, and give not Thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them: wherefore should they say among the people. Where is their God?” (Joel ii. 15-17). And the regard which the Lord mercifully has to connect with them: — “Then will the Lord be jealous for His land, and pity His people And I will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive him into a land barren and desolate.”
There are many such instances in Scripture history of great national fasts called by royal decree, and observed by general consent. In our own land, and in our own day, there have been not a few instances of a practice so laudable and impressive — a whole nation at the monarch’s call humbling itself before God, confessing provocations, and deprecating His wrath.
Some, indeed, would object to national recognitions of religion, and such royal calls and injunctions to observe its duties. Civil magistracy, they tell us, is a civil, temporal, earthly institution, having under its regulation the affairs of time and the world, and having nothing to do with religion; — and the civil magistrate, or chief ruler, they would accordingly prevent from in any way intromitting with religious matters — matters belonging, not to time, but eternity, not to this world, but the world to come.
There are a number of grievous errors wrapt up here in one. It seems to imply that the affairs of this world imay and ought to be carried on apart from the affairs and obligations of religious truth and duty; — thus shutting up religion to a territory of its own, beyond which it must not be suffered to trespass. But apart from this; how can religious obligation lie upon the separate individuals of a nation, and yet the nation as a nation be exempt from it? It is certain that nations as a whole may please or provoke God; just as a family may do; just as an individual may do. God deals with a community as a whole, just as He deals with a household as a whole. And as when God is angry with a family, He deals with them in His wrath for their family provocations, so He deals with communities and kingdoms. If a family, therefore, ought to be religious; — in the sense that not only are its individuals to be religious, but unitedly, and as in their mutual relations, they are to observe the duties of family relio-ion; — it ought to be the same in a kingdom. The father of a family is not only to be a pious man himself, but he is to see that in the united worship of his household, and in religious principles beino- brouo-ht to bear on all its movements, there be a household piety — a family recognition of God. For true religion is not a thing to be kept secret between a man’s own conscience and God. N 0 doubt the springs of it are deep seated in the inmost soul; and the Christian life is a hidden life. But for that very reason, — by reason of the inmost secrecy, and therefore irrepressible power of its principles, — it will assert and vindicate its influence in all circumstances, and over all the relations in which men stand towards one another. It will, therefore, guide those in whom it dwells, not merely in their own private relation to God, and in their worship and more immediate duty towards Him, but in the whole influence they can exert over their fellow-creatures, — in all their relations, whether as superiors, inferiors, or equals. But especially as superiors, — where authority belongs to them, — where they have it in their power to “command their households after them,” — they will arrange that in all the ono-oings of these households God shall be recognised, and His authority and will obeyed. They will say with Joshua, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
It is this element, however, of command, of authority, against the introduction of which in religious observances not a fewreclaim. I would advise with my household, or any irreligious and wayward member of it; I would advise; I would exhort; I would instruct and entreat: but I can go no farther. I can’t make them religious, and I won’t command or compel them. But all this sophistry is utterly laughed to scorn by the simple perusal of the fourth commandment: — “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:” — by the which terms thou art held of God guilty of Sabbath desecration all the same, whether it be “thou, or thy son, or thy daughter, or thy manservant, or thy maidservant, or thy stranger that is within thy gates.” Thou wilt not be held guiltless on the plea that thou didst instruct, didst entreat, didst plead. Didst thou command? Didst thou bring out, for securing obedience to God, all the authority with which thou art endowed as head of thy household, and which thou dost not scruple, if need be, to bring forth for securing obedience to thine own will? To “the stranger that is within thy gates,” thou art bound, — when advice, entreaty, exhortation fail, — to give forth thy command; backed by the penalty that, if it be not obeyed, he can be “within thy gates” no longer. With “thy manservant, and thy maidservant,” thou art to deal, if need be, in like manner also. Yea, “thy son and thy daughter” are not to abide “within thy gates” and despise the commandments of God. Thon art to command them; and, failing obedience, then thou art to disown them, to cast them off, and cast them out. Eli, alas! acted on the principle that a parent may advise the religious things, but may not imperatively command and threaten. And his house and his name were blotted out for ever.
Have you any influence, any power, any authority over children and dependents which you may use in your own service and work, but which you would refrain from bringing forth on the side of God? What were this, but selfishly to surround the accomplishment of your own will with securities, which you refuse to adopt to secure observance in your household to God’s will? And can it be that in such a case you really honour God? Nay: it is not whole-hearted, sincere, thorough-going, and true honouring of God where your government of your household does not call into exercise, when needful, on the side of God, every influence which you can ever rightly use on your own side. If there be a principle of authority — an element of command — vested anywhere in a family at all, religion lays it under contribution to the cause of the Most High — under call to uphold and promote the observance of His will.
And the same principle holds in a nation. So far forth as a monarch’s authority goes, it gues all the length of entitling him to enjoin a fast and a solemn assembly — a public, universal, national recognition of God — the God who is dealinor with the nation as a whole, and summoning the nation as a whole to acknowledge him. Nature itself teaches this truth. It rises up to view in its own native reasonableness in the hour of solemn thoughtfulness, the hour of sad national calamity. All sophistical objections about the impossibility of making men religious by Act of Parliament then disappear. The truth comes obviously to light, and commends itself to reason and conscience. Well was it for Nineveh that its king was not embued with certain modern notions about magistrates and kings having nothing to do with religion. The city’s doom had been sealed by them!
Can anything be more plain than the duty of kings and all in authority to promote among their subjects the advancement of true religion and the glory of God, as that duty is enjoined in the second Psalm: — “Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way.” So that is not merely a dictate and a duty of natural religion, but a revealed command, that monarchs should reign for the glory of God; — yea, that His revealed religion — His holy word, as it declares the religion of Christ, the Son of God — should be honoured by them; that they should “Kiss the Son.” For the Father hath set the Son on the holy hill of Zion — made him “the Prince of the kings of the earth.”
This duty does not, of course, permit them to invade the liberties of Christ’s Church as a divinely -organised and divinely-ordered society, free to obey Christ as her only Head. On the contrary, it is the doctrine we are now maintaining, — the duty of kings to glorify Christ, to consult His word, and consult for His honour, — it is this that will alone ever effectually prevent them interfering with the prerogatives of His Headship or the liberties of His people. When we maintain, therefore, as the Church to which I have the honour to belong maintains, that the civil magistrate has no jurisdiction within or over the Church; God forbid we should set it on the ground that he has nothing to do with religion or the Church of Christ at all. Poor foundation, indeed, would that be for the principle maintained! He has so much to do with religion, and is so bound in his public capacity to act under religious obligation and duty to Christ, that he is bound to know and recognise Christ’s Church; and then to leave her free to serve Christ in all spiritual things. He is bound to know the truth of Christ; to protect those who maintain the truth of Christ; and to promote by every means in his power their labour to circulate and extend it. He is bound to suppress blasphemy, perjury. Sabbath desecration, and all that necessarily tends to the dishonouring of God and the demoralising of the people. He cannot command or compel man to be religious. No commandment can make man religious — not even God’s commandment can do it. The gospel of the grace of God, rendered effectual by the free and sovereign Spirit of God, can alone renew the heart of man or make him sincerely religious. Spiritual obedience to God neither magistrate nor parent can secure. But is no authority, on that account, to be exercised? Is no obligation, on that account, to be enforced? Does God’s own authority cease? Is the obligation to obey God’s commandment at an end? H%8 commandment, even, will never make men religious. Is it, therefore, set aside? No, verily. The assertion of law, obligation, and authority, does not rest upon consequences: whether owned or not, the obligation is the same. And be it remembered, that while God uses His own authority and gives forth His own commands as means with which He often sends the accompanying grace and power to obey; so a parent or superior may not only use his entreaty, example, persuasion, and exhortation in the hope that God will accompany thew. with His blessing; but may specially put forth his authority and peremptory command in the same hope that God will bless iher)i likewise, and secure a true obedience — secure the good and righteous end designed. Let parents, masters, and all in authority make the 101st Psalm the rubric of their household or public procedure.” I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing. I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. 0 when wilt Thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. A fro ward heart shall depart from me: I will not know a wicked person.
.... Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me: he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me. He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house: he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight.” “I know Abraham, that he will command his children and his household after him; and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment; that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which He hath spoken of him.”
It is an evil and a dangerous principle that would exempt the rulers of a kingdom from being in subjection, in their public capacity, to the Word of Christ, and from being under obhgation in their government to rule for the promotion of His kingdom. It strikes at the root of all family as well as national religion; and while it would confine Christ to the separate consciences of individual men, it would refuse Him the right to govern the households and communities into which, in Providence, they are combined. Its universal and perpetual prevalence would prevent the fulfilment of the promise that “the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of Jehovah and His anointed One;” and would subject all nations to the threatening: “The kingdom and nation that will not serve the Church shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted” (Isa. Ix. 12). Again, we repeat, it was fortunate and good for Nineveh that no such notion prevailed there. Theirs was a national fast, decreed by royal authority.
II. The second noticeable circumstance is, that it was accompanied with many solemn and affecting external expressions. In these the king himself led the way and showed the example. “He arose from his throne, and laid his robe from him, and covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.” And he decreed that the whole city should follow this example. The edict which, with counsel and consent of his nobles, he proclaimed, was to this effect: “Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything: let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth.”
How marvellous, sudden, and extreme the change that has passed on the violent and bloody city! Severe and singular is the royal decree. Yet extreme dangers call for extreme remedies; and in the light of coming destruction, unseen yet credited, even this procedure itself is that of staid wisdom and sobriety. In the East, indeed, the manners and customs went, and still go, to authorise and beget a lai’ger and more vivid expression outwardly of inward feeling than in these colder climes we are wont to adopt. The use of sackcloth and ashes, for instance, in a day of grief, or in acknowledgment of guilt, was common. Thus when Mordecai learnt that a decree had gone forth from Ahasuerus for the exterminating of his countrymen, he “rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a loud and bitter cry; and came even before the king’s gate: for none mijjht enter into the kino-’s gate clothed with sackcloth” (Esther iv. 1, 2). And the same course was adopted wherever that bloody edict was announced. “In every province, whithersoever the king’s commandment and his decree came, there was OTeat mourninsf amonof the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes” (v. 3). And so usual were these striking accompaniments of humiliation in ancient times, and in oriental lands, that Jesus speaks of them as if they formed unfailing and integral parts of such exercises of grief, and sorrow, and confession: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matt. xi. 21). But it is not necessary to multiply instances. Every one familiar with his Bible will call to remembrance many of them; and it is the principle of them which is worthy of notice. Of course, as substitutes for repentance, fastings with sackcloth and ashes would be only a hateful hypocrisy, increasing and provoking the wrath of God. As indicating externally nothing more than was truly felt, they were fit accompaniments of solemn moral and spiritual exercises. In reference to the spiritual reality, and guarding against the mere external form, the command is very speaking and impressive: “Rend your hearts and not your garments.” And where this is not attended to, but a mere round of empty forms and shows is paraded before a heart-searching God, nothing could be more utterly Pharisaical and worthy of reprobation. To this degeneracy Israel, in the days of Isaiah, had too clearly reached, when the Lord could
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address them in such terms as these: “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto Me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calHng of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting” (Isa. i. 13). The form alone, while the inner spirit in its persistent wickedness belied the profession, God could endure no longer. God is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. Yet this does not hinder, but where He is thus worshipped in spirit and in truth, the the spirit and truth — the spiritual truth, the true spirituality — may be conjoined with and expressed by actions suitable. To some extent it must be so, and always is so. Though we profess to worship God with our hearts, yet we lift up our hands; we look reverently upwards; or we stand, or kneel. We assume attitudes or postures which in themselves, it may be said, are of no use or value; but which, nevertheless, nature teaches us to feel are suitable to the state of mind; nor could that state of mind be real without prompting these outward manifestations. “The publican, standing afar off”, would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.”
The chief feature in these outward indications of humiliation is this: — they are employed as expressions of guilt, and not merely of a sense of danger. They are all designed to own that the dreaded judgment is righteous; that it is deserved; that we are worthy in justice of nothing else at the hands of the Lord. This is what is implied in these tokens and badges of abasement. They are acknowledgments that all excellence, or beauty, or comeliness, morally and spiritually, have been lost by us; that we have stript ourselves of everything that could recommend us to God; that we are not only in a pitiable condition, but criminal in that we have reduced ourselves to it; and that we own and admit that we are so. This confession the Lord imperatively demands as an indispensable preliminary to the administration of forgiveness; for He will have His forgiveness understood and acknowledged to be what it is — a gracious, free, and sovereign pardon. Till this is admitted, the Lord knows not what to do with His erring people. It is His own declaration that He does not. “Put off” thine ornaments from thee,” — said Jehovah to his people Israel, when they had sinned a great sin before him in making the golden calf and provoking the Lord to jealousy, — ^’ Ye are a stiffnecked people: I will come up into thee in a moment, and consume thee: therefore now put off thine ornaments from thee, that I may know what to do unto thee.” Nor should it be forgotten that the lowly and deplorable appearance of an individual, or a people, sitting in sackcloth and ashes, is designed to serve as an appeal to the Divine commiseration; on the same principle on which Jehoshaphat, when the hearths and homes of Judah were imperilled, arranged, in his fast and humiliation-prayer, the artless and touching scene of which we read: “And all Judah stood before the Lord imfh their little ones, their wives, and their children” (2 Chron. xx. 13).
It may be inquired, however, why the insensate brute creation should have been involved in the roja] edict, or what good purpose could be served by their being made to share in the austerities and severities of a time of fasting? “Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth; “” let neither man nor beast taste anything.” To this it may be replied that although the animals are not responsible and guilty with man, yet such, in God’s estimation, is the exceeding evil of sin, that because of it the animals suffer for man’s sake. Nor can God’s judgments, in general, take effect on a community without involving in that sweeping stroke the brute creation. Can there be famine in a land without the animals being very chief sufferers? “What saith Joel? “The seed is rotten under their clods, the garners are laid desolate, the barns are broken down; for the corn is withered. How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture; yea, the flocks of sheep are made desolate. 0 Lord, to thee will I cry: for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field. The beasts of the field cry also unto thee; for the rivers of waters are dried up, and the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness” (Joel i. 17-20). It was thus in the beginning; when man’s fall brought much misery, — yea, death, — qn the unoffending animals. Nineveh’s destruction would have embraced them also. Generally, too, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain,” waiting for the removal of that subjection to vanity which the introduction of sin hath riveted (Rom. viii. 22). It is not therefore to be wondered at that even the dumb brutes should have been arrayed in sackcloth in the days of Nineveh’s dreaded ruin and deep repentance. The warrior’s steed, in sable plumes and mournful trappings, follows his master’s body to the grave; nor, if outward signs of sorrow be at all allowable, will any feeling mind, that hath witnessed that one, deny its deep and touching pathos. And if any farther vindication of the Ninevites in clothing the beasts of the field with sackcloth, and conjoining them in the deep humiliation and the fast, is needed, let us pass at once beyond all arguments, and call to mind the fact, that the appeal implied in the aspect of the desolate and fasting cattle went home to the heart of God himself; and in vindicating His procedure in sparing the city, He gave in His reason for doing so no less a place to the interests and claims of these dumb animals than the Ninevites had assigned to them in the fast ;. “Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”
It remains that we consider the efficacy of Nineveh’s repentance. “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that He had said that He would do unto them; and He did it not.” In other words, their repentance prevailed to turn aside the judgment threatened. God repented of the evil which He had said that He would do.
Here, some would say, behold the falseness of the doctrine that God hath ordained all things by a sure, eternal, and unchangeable decree. Nay, we reply; behold, rather, the infinite condescension of God in consenting to speak of His own procedure in terms suitable to the weak capacities of man. “Known unto God are all his works from the beginnino; of the world.” Yet the revelation of His secret decree is one thing, and the declaration of His will for our duty is another. Were God always to reveal His sure eternal purpose. He could not carry on a moral government at all. And in carrying on His moral government. He alters His procedure as circumstances alter; yet He changes not thereby His eternal purpose: for both the alteration of the circumstances and the alteration of His procedure are alike decreed by Him — decreed and brought to pass both. Especially He repeatedly speaks of Himself as “repenting.” Thus, at the era of the Flood, — to indicate His deep displeasure and disappointment with the sons of men, whom not even the promise of a Saviour, the seed of the woman, to bruise the serpent’s head, could restrain from ungodliness and violence, — the Lord, on beholding the moral desolation of a corrupt, wicked race, exclaims: “It repenteth me that I have made man on the earth; and it grieved Him at His heart” (Gen. iv. 6). Another instance of the use of this language occurs in the case of the prophet Amos, to whom the Lord threatened to destroy Israel, first slowly and as by a quiet, resistless consumption, under the emblem of the action of grasshoppers or gnawing worms, and then violently and by fire. In each case, Amos interposed with his earnest intercession, and the Lord is said once and again to have “repented.” “Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me; and, behold, he formed grasshoppers in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth, and lo! it was the latter growth after the king’s mowings. And it came to pass, that when they had made an end of eating the grass of the land, then I said, 0 Lord God, forgive, I beseech thee: by whom shall Jacob arise? for he is small. The Lord repented for this: this also shall not be, saith the Lord of hosts” (Amos vii. 1-6). Magnificent and redoubled instance of the truth that “the eflfectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much “! while it is a double instance also of the Lord repenting and turning away from the evil which He thought to do. But perhaps the passage of Scripture bearing most closely on this feature of the Lord’s procedure, is that in Jeremiah, where it is distinctly and implicitly announced as being at the foundation of all His moral government by threats and promises, rewards and punishments: — “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.” And the same holds good on the other side also. “And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not ray voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit them” (Jer. xviii. 7-10).
It was precisely this general principle which came in for the salvation of Nineveh. “They turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that He said He would do unto them.” And was there any changeableness in God, indicated by this change in His procedure? Nay; this change in His procedure was needful to avert the charge of change in His character, and in the ijrinciples of His procedure. It was wicked, violent, unrighteous, atheistical, proud, and luxurious Nineveh which God had threatened to destroy. A city sitting in sackcloth and ashes, humbled in the depths of self-abasement, and appealing as lowly suppliants to His commiseration — a Nineveh like that — that Nineveh, He had never threatened. That Nineveh He visited not with ruin. He had never said He would. The Nineveh which God threatened to destroy passed away; it became totally another city — far more so, in virtue of this change in moral state, than if it had been translated from its olden geographical position, and wholly transformed in its architectural appearance. Surely its great moral change has made it more truly another place — a kind of new creature, old things having passed away, and all things become new — than any alteration in its physical aspect could have done. It really, in God’s estimation, is not the Nineveh He threatened at all. The terrific threatening does not apply now. “God saw their works;” — their fruits mtet for repentance, namely, “that they turned from their evil way; — and God repented of the evil that He said that He would do unto them: and He did it not.”
Of course, it is after the manner of men that the Spirit speaks, when He attributes to God at any time repentance or a change of mind at all. And doubtless He speaks of God after the manner of men continually, For there has been far too much said in the way of accounting for, and explaining, and justifying such an expression as this: “the Lord repented that He had made man;” or “repented of the evil He thought to do;” far too much on the idea, or as countenancing the idea, that this expression needs a vindication peculiar to itself. It is not so. It needs no more to be vindicated than a thousand expressions in which God, putting on the person of a man, speaks to us as from the position, and as with the feelings of a man, in order to make His own mind and heart intelligible to us. We are ever to guard against assigning human imperfection to God. But we are equally to guard against assigning to Him such a character or nature as would render living, intelligible, friendly intercourse between Him and His people impossible. But impossible utterly, all such intercourse must be, if I may not speak to God in the same forms, and phrases, and feelings in which I would offer a request, or state my case to a fellow-man, though of course with unreserved submission and unlimited adoration of the Almighty and Holy One of Irsael. My adoration unbounded; — my surrender of myself to God unreservedly; — these are tributes to the searchless glory of His Godhead which I may not withhold, and yet profess to worship Him. Nevertheless, with these. I must be allowed, in condescension to my weakness, to ask God to be “attentive to the voice of my supplication;” to “behold and visit me;” to “stretchout His hand” for my help; to “shine upon me with the light of His countenance;” to “awake;” to “arise;” to “draw near;” to “come and dwell with me.” All these expressions and requests are after the manner of man. I must be allowed to spread out my sorrow and my trial before Him, precisely as if my design and expectation were to work upon His feelings, and move and induce Him in His pity to deliver me. I must be allowed, with Hezekiah, to spread out the threatening letter before Him, as if the very sight of it, held before the throne in my hand, were to make a deep impression on God’s heart, as it implies an artless and sincere expression of the helpless anguish of my heart. I must be allowed to “fill my mouth with arguments,” and make every appeal to God to move in my cause which its urgent and clamant case suggests. And all the while, believing that His counsel is formed from everlasting — that His counsel shall stand, and He shall do all His pleasure — that He is of one mind, and none can turn Him — believing this, and adoring, I am not to concern myself about how this can consist with my weakness, which cannot rise beyond finite forms of expression, and desire, and address, and expectation. Rather I must in this matter lay aside things too great for me, and seek to have my heart as a weaned child.
For it lies at the foundation of all intercourse between God and man that God should Himself address us, and permit us to address Him, in expressions suited to our weak capacities and
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conceptions, rather than dictated by what were suitable to His infinite glory and searchless being. Does it then follow that in thus condescending unto the weakness of our nature, He does injustice to His own, — or misrepresents it? That does not follow. God can speak of Himself after the manner of man, and what He thus speaks may yet be worthy of God. And when the proof of this is sought, let it be found in the glorious fact, that God made man in His own image; and in the fact, still more glorious, that One who was in the form of God, and thought it not robbery to be equal with God, was found in form and fashion as a man. Did Godhead and humanity in the one person of Emmanuel jostle, disagree, hamper or misrepresent each other? God forbid. The man Christ Jesus is the brightness of the Father’s glory. His tears over Jerusalem, while as God He had eternally decreed and foreseen its destruction, were no misrepresentation of the very love wherewith the Godhead is affected in even handing over the impenitent to everlasting hell. The surprise, astonishment, and grief with which the man Christ Jesus listened to Peter denying Him, — and which He expressed in His ever-memorable “look,” — were no contradiction to the fact that the same one person, the eternal Son of God, knew from everlasting that Peter would deny Him. And so, if we would behold the endless and searchless glories that seem to withdraw the eternal Godhead for ever from our knowledge, or be convinced that, in ever-blessed perfect harmony with these, there are in the same Divine Being affections of grace, and tenderness, and condescension, admitting us more nearly and profoundly to His love and friendship, than the capacities of any human friend for love and intercourse ever could admit us, let us betake ourselves evermore to Him who is “God manifest” — God most manifest — “in the flesh.” He “showeth us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” 0 thou that didst “command the light to shine out of darkness, shine in our hearts, and give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ “! (2 Cor. iv. 6).