Seeking the Face of God

Psalm xxvii. 8, 9

When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek. Hide not Thy face far from me.

H^HERE appears to be a good deal of autobiography -** in this psalm. The writer, whom we take to be David, travels back in thought to the past of his life, and his backward glance fixes on two distinct objects. At ene time he thinks of the past as God’s past, all illumined by the radiance of His favour, and helped by the might of His imparted strength; and at another, he thinks of it as his own past, wherein he strove to love and serve his keeper God; and from both of these aspects of the days that are gone he draws encouragement to hope that God will be the same, and humbly resolves that he, for his part, will continue the habit of trust and obedience. For instances of the remembrance of God’s past, we may take the words which follow this text, “Thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation,” and the other reference to the signal deliverance ol his early years, which is often unnoticed by

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ordinary readers, “When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell n (ver. 2). The expressions recall the braggart boast of Goliath, u I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field,” and the vivid picture of the end of the fight, when the stones went crashing into the thick skull of the bully, “and he fell upon his face to the earth.” As instance of his retrospect of the past as his, take such words as these, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after,” or, “I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Here, in these words of our text, these two ways of looking at the past are woven into one strong cord, that the Psalmist may hang his confidence and his prayers thereon. What God has been saying to him in days that are no more, and what he has been saying to God, are planted like the two piers of an arch, that from them may rise heavenwards the prayer and the hope, “Hide not thy face far from me;” “Leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.” Happy they who can look back on years made fair by God’s recognised gifts and their own loving obedience, and who can feel that what God has been to them, and what they have been to God, has stamped their lives with an impress to which all the future will be true I Happy they if their forward look is a prayer offered in lowliness, and not a boast made in presumption! We have here then God’s voice to the heart, the heart’s echo to that voice, and the heart’s cry to God, founded on both the Divine voice and the human echo.

There is here, first, Goets voice to the heart.

There may be some difficulties about the rendering of our text, which, however, need not concern us now. Our English version is sufficient for our present purpose, and, according to it, we have here, as it were, summed up in a kind of dialogue of two phrases, the whole speech of God to us men, and the inmost meaning of all that devout souls say to God. “Seek ye my face n — such is the essential meaning of all God’s words and works, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek” — such is the essentia! meaning of all prayer, worship, and obedience.

But let us observe a little more closely what the Psalmist means by that phrase, “Seeking God’s face.” It needs to be translated into a more modern dialect, in order to convey much meaning to some of us. We may begin then by asking the significance of that expression, “the face of God.”

It is one of those strong Scripture phrases which escape any danger of misconstruction by the very boldness of their corporeal metaphors. The highest and most spiritual conception of God is reached, not by a pedantic scrupulosity in avoiding material representations, but by an unhesitating use of these, and the remembrance that they are representations. The unsubstantial abstraction of the metaphysical God, described only in terms as far removed as may be from human analogies, for fear of being guilty of “anthropomorphism,” never helped of gladdened any human sod. It is but a bit of mist through which you can see the stars shining. But the God whom men need and can know and love, the God who it a Spirit, comes near to us in descriptions cast in the mould of humanity, and loses none of His purely Spiritual essence, nor any of His Infinitude, because we have learned to speak of the eye, and arm, and the hand, and the heart, and the face of the Lord. The more unmistakably “gross” and u carnal “the representations, the more do they proclaim their true character, and the less danger of their being misunderstood. The eye of the Lord is His all-seeing knowledge; the arm and the hand of the Lord are substantially the same, though with certain shades of difference in the ideas which they suggest, and may be said to express the active energy of the Divine nature. The face of the Lord, we may say, is that aspect or side of the divine nature which is turned to man, and is perceptible by him. It is, roughly speaking, almost equivalent to “the name of the Lord.” That expression has a much profounder meaning than is ordinarily felt to belong to it It means the manifested character of God, the net result of all His self-revelation by word and work. And so these two phrases — the face of the Lord and the name oftht Lordy come to nearly the same thing. Both of them are worth noting for one reason besides others — namely, that they bring out into clear prominence the twin facts, that there is that in God which may be known, and also that which cannot be. Whilst once or twice in the Old Testament” the face of GodM is used to express the dazzling brightness of His essential being, which no man can look on, it more usually means the knowable part of the Divine nature,

Q and, like the other phrase which we have compared with it, draws a broad distinction between that and the unknowable depths — the unspeakable in God. We see the radiant brightness of the full moon, but no eye has ever beheld the other side of that pure silver shield So the simple expression of our text keeps us from the twin errors of supposing that we can know nothing of God, and of forgetting that we can know but an aspect and a side of His nature.

It may be further noticed that another idea is usually connected with the expression — namely that of light The face of God is thought of as the sun, and so we read “Lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us,” and other similar passages, in which the two ideas of the rising of the sun on an else dark world, and the rising of the Divine countenance on else dark and wintry hearts are paralleled. All thoughts, then, of brightness, of clear illumination, of gladness and knowledge, of favour and warmth, cluster round the emblem; and of the Jehovah of the Old Testament, as of the glorified Christ of the New, it may be said, “His countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.”

If these things be true, then we may learn what it is to “seek His face.” We do not need long and painful search, as for something lost in dim darkness, in order to find the sun. We do not need to seek the sun with lanterns; nor to grope after God if haply we may find Him. A man need only come out of his dark hiding-place to find it If he will but turn his face to the light, the glory will brighten his features and make glad his eyes.

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And in like manner, to seek God’s face is no long, dubious search, nor is He hard to be found We have only to desire to possess — and to act in harmony with the desire — and we shall walk all the day in the light of His countenance.’ Count the knowledge of God and the experience of His sunny favour as more than all other treasures of wisdom or delights of love or lower things. “There be many that say, Who will show us any good?” and the search is vain, even because it has no clear knowledge of what is good, and seeks to make up for the limitations of its possessions by their multitude. “Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us.” That is the one pearl of great price, for which all the fragmentary and partial preciousnesses of many goodly pearls are wisely exchanged. Endeavour to keep vivid the consciousness of that face as looking always in on you, like the solemn frescoes of the Christ which Angelico painted on the walls of his convent cells, that each poor brother might feel His Master ever with him. Make Him your companion, and then, though you may feel the awe of the thought, “Thou hast set our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance,” you will find a joy deeper than the awe, and learn the blessedness of those, sinful though they may be, who walk in the full brightness of that face. Let Him be the object of your thoughts, and more and more of your whole nature. Let feeling and desire, affection and will, mind and work, all turn to Him, taking Him for motive and end, for strength and means, and turning all your being towards Him as the sunflower turns to follow the sun. Scrupulously avoid whatever might

Jim the vision of His face. An invisible vapour may hide a star, and we only know that the film is in the nightly sky because Jupiter, which was blazing a moment ago, has become dim or has disappeared. So fogs and vapours from the undrained swamps of our own selfish, worldly hearts may rob the thought of God of all its genial lustre, and make it an angry ball of fire, or may hide Him altogether from us; and we cannot be seeking Him and earthly things any more than we can serve God and Mammon.

If this be the meaning of seeking God’s face, then note that this invitation is God’s merciful voice to us alL Whether the Psalmist is thinking about any special time or way in which God so spoke to him does not appear. Rather, we may suppose that he is summing up the meaning of the whole of God’s dealings with him in the past However that may be, it is true that God thus speaks to each of us, and that we may even say He speaks thus only to us. By the revelation to us of His own beauty and wonderful fitness to satisfy the hunger of our souls, He is wooing us to seek His face. So infinitely fair and good is He, that to make Himself visible is to draw us to Himself. To know Him is to love Him, and the heart of all His self-revelation by speech and deed is the gracious call to come to His brightness and be at rest By the very make of our spirits, which bear on them alike in their weakness and their strength the sign that they are His, and can only be at rest in Him, He says, ‘Seek ye my face.” By all His providences of joy or sorrow, by disappointments and fulfilments, by hopes and xhi.] SEEKING THE FACE OF GOD. 229

fruitions, by losses and gains, by all the alternation! which 44 toss us to His breast,” He says, u Seek ye my face,” In all that befalls us our purged ears may hear “the great voice saying, Come up thither.” And most of all in Jesus Christ, the true “angel of His face,” in whom all the lustre of His radiance is gathered, does He beckon us to Himself. The highest, most loving, most beseeching form of that wonderful invitation, “Seek ye my face,” is the call of Him in whose face we see the glory of God as we see it nowhere besides:” Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden;99 So He speaks to the whole world. So He speaks to each of us. So He speaks to me by Christ, who is the dearest utterance of His love and the express image of His person,

IL We have here the hearts echo to the voice of God. “My heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” Swift and immediate, as the thunder to the lightning, the answer follows the invitation. If the resolve to seek God’s face be not made by us at the very moment when we become aware of His loving call, it is very unlikely to be made at all The first notes of that low voice fall on the heart with more persuasive power than they retain after it has become familiar with them, even as the firstheard song of the thrush in spring-time, that breaks the long wintry silence, has a sweetness all its own. The echo answers as soon as the mother voice ceases. But how many of us hesitate and delay, and content ourselves with intentions to answer, and so by lapse of time lose our very consciousness that God is speaking to us at all

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Some of us are as dead to the perception of His gracious call, just because it has been sounding on uninterruptedly, as are the dwellers by the waterfall to its unremitting voice. And it is always dangerous to delay for one moment the uprising of the heart in any resolution which we know to be right. Any unnecessary interval interposed between the perception of duty and the doing of duty weakens the perception and the resolution as well, and lowers the whole tone of a man. So do not let us tolerate any lingering hesitation in ourselves in yielding to the Divine summons. The only safety, the only peace lies in prompt obedience and in an immediate answer.

There is also brought out here very plainly the complete correspondence between the Divine command and the devout man’s resolve. Word for word the invitation is repeated in the answer. This man’s obedience is no partial obedience. He does not take part of God’s call and yield to that, leaving the rest to be dispersed in empty air, but all the breadth and depth of the message that comes to him from God is contained in his announcement of his purpose. Like the sailor at the tiller, he answers his captain’s directions by repeating them. “Port,” says the officer. “Port it is,” says the steersman. “Seek ye my face.” “Thy face will I seek.” The correspondence in words means the correspondence in action and the thorough-going obedience. How unlike the half-and-half seeking, the languid search, as of people listlessly looking for something which they do not much expect to find, and do not much care whether they find or no, which characterises so many so-called Christians I xin.] SEEKING THE FACE OF GOD. 331

They are seekers after God, are they? Yes, with less eagerness than they would seek for a sovereign if it rolled from their fingers into the mud. And so need we wonder that so may of us have but little consciousness of a found God to brighten our lives? “Seek, and ye shall find” is ever true, thank God, but it must be a whole-hearted seeking, and not the feeble, flickering desire and the listless action which mark so many of us.

Note, too, the firm and decisive resolution shining through the very brevity of the words. The original gives that brevity even more strongly. Three words suffice to hold the law which the man has made for the pole-star of his life. Fixed resolves need short professions. A Spartan brevity, as of a man with his lips tightly locked together, is fitting for such purposes. It is the waverers, who have more than one end in view, or the feeble-willed who try to brace themselves up by talking, making a fence of words around them, who are profuse in their vows. The sober temperament, that measures difficulties and knows the tenacity as well as the gravity of its determination, keeps its breath for the struggle, and does not waste it on blowing the trumpet beforehand. If we are quite resolved that our life’s business is to be seeking God’s face, we shall for the most part say little about it

What a contrast that clear, self-conscious, firm resolution is to the hesitations and indecisions so common among us 1 How few of us could honestly crystallize the aims that guide our life into any single sentence! How much fewer there are who could do it in that sentence t We try the impossible feat of riding on two horses at once. We resolve and retract, and hesitate and compromise. The ship heads now one way and now another, and that not because we are wisely tacking — that is to say, seeking to reach one point by widely-varying courses — but because our hand is so weak on the helm that we drift wherever the wash of the waves and the buffets of the wind carry us.

Further, we have in this heart’s echo to the voice of God the conversion of a general invitation into a personal resolution.

The call is, u Seek ye” The answer is, “/will seek.” That is what we have all to do with God’s words. He sows His invitations broadcast; we have to make them our own. He sends out His mercy for a world; we have to claim each our portion. He issues His commands to all; I have to make them the law for my life. The stream flows deep and broad from the throne of God, and parts into four heads, the number expressive of universal diffusion throughout the world; but I have to bring it into my own garden by my own trench, and to carry it to my own lip in my own cup. The gospel tells as that Christ died for the world; I have to “appropriate “that, as our fathers used to name it, by saying He gave Himself for me. So when that merciful voice comes to us there must be, each for himself, a personal response to it” Seek ye my face.” Let us each reply, * Thy face, Lord, will /seek.”

Nothing in all the world is so blessed as to hear that wonderful beseeching call sounding in every providence, a veiling to us from every corner of the universe, speak* ing to us in the light of setting suns and in the hush of midnight skies, sounding in the break of waves on the beach and in the rustle of leaves in the forest depths, whispering to us in the depths of our own hearts and wooing us by all things to our rest Everything assumes a new meaning and is appareled in celestial light when we are aware that everything is a messenger from God to guide us to Himself. And nothing is so joyous as to yield to that most tender summons, while on the other hand, its non-acceptance breeds and brings discord and unrest into our whole being. To stifle it wholly is impossible, conscience will ever and again stir. When we feel most secure, and have deadened our ears most effectually, as we think, some word or look, a chance line in a book, a sunset, a phrase in a sermon, the meeting of a funeral, some fleeting gladness, sets the chords vibrating again. So there is constant inward strife, or, if not, so much the worse; for the man who has lost the capacity of discerning God’s voice has lost the most of what ennobles his nature. But that is heaven on earth, nobleness, peace, and power, to stand as at the point of some great ellipse, to which converge from all sides the music of God’s manifold invitations, and listening to them to say, I hear, and I obey. Thou dost call, and I answer, Lo I here am I.

III. The third bend in the stream of thought here is the hearts cry to God founded on both the Divine voice and the human echo.

44 Hide not thy face far from me” is clearly a prayer built upon both these elements in the past God’s invitation, and my acceptance of it, both give me the right to pray thus, and are pledges of the answer.

As to the former, “Thou saidst, Seek ye my face n — “hide not thy face from me” is but the vivid way of putting the thought that God cannot contradict Himself. His commandments are promises. “Thou shalt” is but the hard, rough shell which covers a sweet “I will” from His lips. If He bids us seek His face, He thereby pledges Himself to show us His face. He binds Himself to us by His commandments; and, in that sense too, as well as in others, His law is a covenant, placing Him under obligations, even as it does us. He recognises the force of the plea upon our lips, and owns that we prevail when we urge it He can point with majestic self-vindication to all the records of the past, and assert, “I have never said to the seed of Jacob, Seek ye my face in vain.” So we may build an unshaken confidence on His unchangeable fidelity to the obligation under which He comes by sending forth such a summons. Be sure that God never calls us to a feast and sets before us an empty table, when we take Him at His word and come. His past is the guarantee and pattern for His future. Has He bid me seek His face? Then He cannot hide His face from me, nor say me nay when I beseech Him to lift up its light upon me.

As to the second ground of this prayer, it rests on my past as well as on God’s. “Thy face will I seek — hide not thy face from me.” That is the confidence that because we seek we shall find. My feeblest desire brings answers correspondent to its strength and purity. It cannot be that any man ever truly longed to know God and was balked of his wish. You may have exactly a» much of God as you want; as much, that is, as you can hold, as much as the ordering of your lives makes it possible that we should possess. There is no limit to our consciousness of God’s loving presence and help, except that drawn by ourselves. He fills the vessels we bring, be they large or small And there is no possibility of any longing after Him remaining unsatisfied. No hunger of heart, no aching emptiness, no eyes failing with looking for the visitor who never comes, no pining away in sick disappointment, have any place in the relation of the soul to God. So sufficient is He, so near, so infinitely desirous to impart Himself, that He needs but the narrowest opening to pour His fulness into the heart Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after God, for they shall be filled. He does not hold out a gift with one hand and then twitch it away with the other when we try to grasp, as children do with light reflected from a looking-glass on a wall That fair face does not elude us when we try to look on it, but to seek is to find, to wish for God is to have God.

“Seek His face evermore,” and your life will be bright because you will walk in the light of His countenance always. That face will brighten the darkness of death, and “make a sunshine in that shady place.” As you pass through the dark valley it will shine in upon you, as the sun looks through the savage gorge in the Himalayas, above which towers that strange mountain

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which is pierced right through with a circular aperture; and when you reach the land beyond you will enter it with the wonderful hope on your lips, “As for me, I shall behold tHy face in righteousness,” and heaven’s heaven will be that” His servants serve Him and see His fact,19