The Perfect Faith # 1

The Perfect Faith # 1

"Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" (Job 13:16).

These words have always seemed to be the expression of the profoundest faith. When David sings, "I will sing unto the Lord because He hath dealt bountifully with me," it seems to be something which all men can understand. It is a gratitude and trust won by visible mercy. But when a soul is able to declare that even under the smiting, ay, even under the slaying, of God it is able still to trust in Him, everyone feels that that soul has reached a very true and deep, sometimes it must seem a rare, faith in Him.

And yet it is a degree of faith which we know that men have attained before they can be in any complete or worthy way believers to God. Merely to trust Him when He is manifestly kind to them, is surely not enough. A man's own soul cannot be satisfied with that. A man questions himself whether that is faith at all; whether it is not merely sight. Everywhere and always any lofty conception of trust has been compelled not to stop short of this: such an entrance into the nature and character of the trusted person that even when he seemed to be unreasonable and disappointing and unkind the faithful soul could trust Him still.

Always the man who really wanted to completely trust another man has been obligated to feel that his trust was not complete if it stopped short of that.

They are words that might be said almost in desperation. The soul compelled to realize that there was no other hope for it, that if this hope failed it every hope was gone, and feeling that it could not live without some hope, might say, "I must and will keep faith in God. No matter how He fails me I will cling to Him still; for I must cling to something still, and there is nothing else to cling to, and so, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." This is the spirit of a familiar hymn which always seemed to me doubtful as the expression of a healthy or even of a possible experience.

"I can but perish if I go.
I am resolved to try;
For if I stay away,
I know I shall forever die."

It is a question whether a faith as desperate as that is faith at all, but certainly it is not the faith expressed by these words out of our English version of the Book of Job. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." There is something far more cordial about these words. They are not desperate; they anticipate possible disappointment and pain; but they discern a hope beyond them. Their hope lies in the character of God. Whatever His special treatment of the soul may be, the soul knows Him in His character. And for the explanation of His treatment, for the cordial acceptance of His treatment even when it cannot be explained, the soul falls back upon its certainty concerning His character.

There is no desperation here. There is no more clinging to God because the soul, looking all about, can find nothing else to cling to. All is positive. God is just what the soul needs, and to its certainty of what God is the soul turns to every distress and perplexity about what God does. Behind its perception of God's conduct, as an illumination and as a retreat, always lies its knowledge of God's character.

The relations of character and conduct to each other are always interesting. Let us look at them in general for a few minutes. The first and simplest idea of their relation is that conduct is the mouth-piece of character. What a man is declares itself through what he does. I see a man steal, and I know he has a thievish heart. I see a soldier fling himself upon the spears of the enemy, and I know that he is brave and patriotic. We know how closely this relation between character and conduct is dumb and paralyzed. Its life is there but it is shut out from action, and all man's history bears witness that it is shut out from growth. Mere qualities which do not become conscious of themselves, and do not make themselves effective by contact with the world of things, lie stagnant, and can hardly be called live qualities at all. And on the other hand, conduct without character is thin and most unsatisfying. The pleasant deed which does not mean a kindly heart behind it, the dashing enterprise which is mere physical excitement, the steadiness in work which is merely weary and unsatisfactory all of these become. No; conduct is the trumpet at the lips of character. Character without conduct is like the lips without the trumpet, whose whispers die upon themselves and do not stir the world. The world has a right to disallow all claims of character which do not utter themselves in conduct. "It may be real, - it may be good," the world has a right to say, "but I cannot know it or test it; and I am sure that however good and real it is, it is deprived of the condition of the best life and growth which is activity."

~Phillips Brooks~

(continued with # 2)