Lulled by High Ideals

“I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and repentest Thee of the evil.” — Jo:ah iv. 2.

‘’I knew that Thou art a gracious God.’’ And when that is the indwelling knowledge, lying in the secret heart of a man, what will be the character of the man? I knew that Thou art a gracious God.” What will be the ethical fruit of such knowledge? What may we anticipate as the spontaneous and shining issue of such convictions? What was the practical and vital logic of Jonah himself? Let me prefix the preliminary sentence of the verse, for I have only given an amputated limb. Here is the full body of the apostle’s thought. Therefore I hasted to flee unto Tarshish, for I knew that Thou art a gracious God.” “I ignored the clamant imperative of the Eternal will, for I knew that Thou art a gracious God!” I knew that Thou art... full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy “; and, therefore, ‘’ I hasted to flee unto Tarshish,” even though the voice of the Eternal was calling loudly elsewhere, and Nineveh was speeding down a steep path of degeneracy to moral and spiritual death. ‘’ Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it: for their wickedness is come up before Me! ‘’ “Therefore, I hasted to flee unto Tarshish, for I knew that Thou art a gracious God.” You see the steps of his reasoning. Nineveh is most certainly needy. Its wickedness is portentous and glaring. Things, bad beyond utterance, gaily parade themselves in the public streets. Corruption deepens into intensified filth, all the filthier that it bedecks itself with an artificial grace. Sorrow hides in silence, and wrong smothers its wails for fear of deeper wrong. The end of it all must — ah, well, the end of it all will be all right: the ungodly ferment will issue in delicate wine: the gracious Lord will interpose, the putrefaction will cease, and the terrors of night will be changed into the songs of the morning! Nineveh is bad, but then the Lord is good, and in His gracious keeping I confidently entrust the guilty city. Nineveh is needy! but ‘’ I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and repentest Thee of the evil ‘’... and therefore I hasted to flee unto Tarshish! “Here is an extraordinary mental succession; a gloriously rich conception of Deity used to justify a flagrant neglect of duty; here is indolence finding its sustenance and justification in grace. Let me suggest to you a rather startling Scriptural parallelism. In one of our Lord’s parables He opens out a man’s mind and reveals to us quite another conception of Deity than the one upon which we have just gazed. I knew Thee.” He begins almost after the manner of Jonah — ‘’ 1 knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed.” And what will be the issue of such conception, a conception of austerity and tyranny — a Pharaoh on the throne? “And I went and buried thy talent in the earth.” The conception of unjust austerity found its issue in moral sterility. A man’s conception of Deity is used to justify a deliberate neglect of duty. But here is the amazing coincidence, that the issues of the two conceptions are the same, while the conceptions are infinitely divergent. Therefore I hasted to flee unto Tarshish,” and duty was ignored! 1 went and buried thy talent,” and duty was ignored! And yet one had its origin in tyranny, the other had its origin in grace. There must be something rotten in the premise when there is something so unhallowed in the conclusion. But before we make further quest into the roots of the reasoning let us mark its vital connection with some of the thought of our own time. Arise, go to Nineveh!” It was a call to the foreign field. It was the foreigner, the stranger, the far-away man, who was in peril, in

darkness, in need. And it was foreign service that was disregarded, or say excused, on the plea that all men had to deal with a gracious, and merciful, and all-compassionating God. It will be all right with the Ninevitcs! The sword of Damocles is not suspended above them! Their sky is not black with imminent storm, pregnant with the thunders and lightnings of an outraged God. Their sky, like ours, is brimming with grace, and His banner over them is love. There is nothing urgent in their condition; ‘He is slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, ^’ We can go leisurely about our ministries; there is no call for haste!

I ask you — is there not something modern in the ancient reasoning? Let us look at the practical logic by which our conduct is determined. A hundred years ago men held very different conceptions of the needs and perils of the foreign field to those which are commonly held to-day. The conception of God was more awful, more austere, more severe. The conception of hell was more appalling, irreparable, full of final destruction. To be ignorant of God was to be lost. The heathen — the men of Nineveh — were regarded as sliding, in countless multitudes, into an inevitable and hopeless hell. Men used to make appalling calculations, and they would alarm their audiences by telling them how many were passing, with every tick of the clock, into irretrievable perdition. The state of the foreign field was looked upon with all the urgency with which we look upon a rudderless and broken ship, held in the grip of mighty tempestuous seas, with man after man dropping numb from the rigging into the engulfing deep. And foreign mission work was life-boat work, and the boat was launched, and men went out to save imperilled brethren on the tremendous seas of common life! And O, the urgency of it, and the sacrifice of it, and the heroism of it! And 0, the joy of it, and the shoutings of it, when the lifeboatmen came ashore again, and told the story of salvation, effected on far-off and desolate seas! And so, when men are drowning, their saviours speed upon their mission, and the pleasure trip to Tarshish is delayed.

But now, in many ways, for better or worse, the thought of the Church has changed. We have taken the frown out of the sky, and we have removed the peril out of the deep. We no longer think of the heathen as dropping by shoals into unillumined and hopeless night. If they drop from the rigging at all, they fall, not into engulfing seas, but into “the everlasting arms! ‘’ And because that hell has closed her mouth, and mercy’s gates are opened wide, we feel that the urgency has gone out of the mission, and that the strain of care and sacrifice can be eased. We no longer go out as life-boats — to save souls, but as teachers to enlighten minds; no longer to visit possible wrecks, but to beautify the boats whose certain haven is their Father’s land. Our emphasis has changed; we know that” He is a gracious God, and full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy,’’ and the missionary fleetness has gone out of our steps.

That was Jonah’s reasoning, and I say it is allied to a similar reasoning which is commonly prevalent in our time, a reasoning which is tragically and pathetically untrue, and which must crucify the Son of God afresh. It means that hell ha more motive power than heaven, and that fear has more constraint than grace. But have they? Let us come to the very crux of the problem, and let us root out the loose and rotten elements in the reasoning. Is fear mightier than grace, and does it endow the soul with fleeter and stronger wings? I knew that Thou art a gracious God.’’ He knew little or nothing about it! That is the hiatus in his reasoning. That is the rottenness in his conclusion. He knew little or nothing about the grace and mercy of the Lord. He had an opinion about it, but he had no deep experimental knowledge of its enriching and inspiring power. “1 knew! ‘’ He was using a great word with painfully superficial meaning. In the Old and ISTew Testament knowledge is a word of unspeakably deep significance, reaching away to the infinite. ‘’ If a man say, I know God, and keep not His commandments, he is a liar.” This is... life, to know! ‘’ To know is to live, to share the life of Him we know. Will you mark the shining peak of this towering aspiration of the Apostle Paul? “What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ. Yea, verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, nd do count them but dung... that I may know Him! ‘’ The superlative glory which awaits him in the beatific light is this, ‘^ Then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The cardinal element in spiritual knowledge is not a well-arranged theology, but a religious experience. A well-arranged theology may be like a herbalist’s dry museum; a religious experience has about it the life and beauty and fragrance of a well-watered garden.’’ To have really known the gracious God is to have tasted and seen how gracious He is, and to go about with the taste in the mouth, an everpleasant and refreshing inspiration. And there is this sure mark — I think it is the hall-mark upon all the grace-blest children of God, that they are keenly desirous that others should share their experience, and should roam and feed in the garden of their own soul’s delight. The grace-blessed child can never tarry comfortably in the garden alone: his own joys are multiplied when others are plucking fruit from the same tree.

This is his cry to those without, ‘^ I sat down under his trees, and he has satisfied my mouth with good things! “^^ O taste and see that the Lord is good! “‘’ Taste and see!” And why? Because in this sphere the taster becomes the advertiser. The experimentalist becomes the herald. The disciple becomes the apostle, inevitably and spontaneously, for every soul added to the kingdom becomes the witness of his Saviour’s praise. To know the grace of God is inevitably to become its messenger. I am not afraid of a broadened conception of the love and grace of the Lord if only men are in the Lord’s garden and living on His fruits. Every guest will be a missioner, who will go out into the highways and hedges, intent on multiplying the guests, and the sphere of his enterprise will be as wide as the world. Eaten grace makes one hungry for service. Missionary work will need no urging when the Church takes her meals at the enriching and bloodmaking table of the Lord. What I do fear is, that we should sing of a grace that we have not known. I am afraid of that merely theoretical and drugging conception of grace which makes us easy about the needs and perils of Nineveh, and which relaxes the thews and sinews of a masculine sense of duty. Let us judge the reality of our discipleship by the intensity of our apostleship. Let us measure our knowledge of grace by the quality of our sentiments towards Nineveh. “In Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile.” He who has tasted the Lord loves the race. Jonah thought well of God, and neglected man.

“And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time,” Oh, the mercy hidden in those three closing words! ‘’The second time!’’ That God should give us a second chance! The mercy of it, as a multitude can testify! And Jonah, after tragic and sorrowing experience, after distress and providence which had brought him into deeper intimacy with his Maker’s will, heard the call ‘^ the second time.” “Arise, go unto Nineveh, and preach!”

‘’ So Jonah arose, and went unto jSTineveh, according to the word of the Lord,” And what happened? He found that this weary, heart-sickened, sinful people had a secret aching bias towards God! They listened to his message, they heeded it, they absorbed it, they obeyed it. They ‘’ turned from their evil ways,” they set their sin-marred, sorrow-worn faces toward heaven, and cried mightily unto God. While this man had been idly journeying to Tarshish, this people had been secretly wearying for God. And is not the coincidence modern? With all my soul I believe that the secret heart of the people is awearying for our Lord and Christ.