The Perfect Faith # 3

The Perfect Faith # 3

But suppose the other case. Suppose that the man, behind and through the treatment that God has given him, has seen the character of God. God has been just to him. He has not rested merely in the instances of God's justice, but has risen to the conception that God is just. God has been loving to him. He does not merely recount God's loving acts, but he sees God, and says, "Yes, God is love." He goes up along the conduct to the character. He goes up along the sunlight to the sun. His nature, made to know God's nature, does know Him with immediate apprehension. The acts of God toward him are, as it were, the ushers which open the door and lead us into His presence. When we are once there the ushers may retire. We may forget the special acts of love or justice which first showed us what He was, and live in the direct perception of His character. If that is possible, then evidently we are ready to see each new act which God does toward us with all the illumination of His realized character upon it. Let us be certain that He did it, and we know that it must be just and kind because He is love and justice. Let me know that the water flows directly from the fountain, and it must be pure because the fountain, I know, is purity itself. The taste of corruption which seems to be in the water must really be in me who taste it. God being good cannot do evil. I, standing where all my experience has brought me, clear in His presence, know that He is good. Therefore, however cruel His deeds may seem, they cannot shake my certainty that He is wise. Therefore, in the tumult and distress of what seems to be the ruin of my life, I can still stand calm and say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him."

This, then, is our doctrine of man's relation to the conduct and the character of God. Through God's conduct man knows God's character, and then through God's character God's conduct is interpreted. Such a doctrine neither sets man in the miserable and false position of forever judging God by his own poor standards, nor, on the other hand, does it call on man to bow in blindness and accept as good the will of a God of whom he knows nothing because that God has borne no witness of Himself. There are the two dangers of all man's search after God, - one, that man will keep his idea of God forever on test and trial, and never cordially accept Him and enlarge his own life by trusting faith in the life greater than his; the other, that man will make a God of his own imagining, and never verify his thought of Him by any reference to the facts of human life. Against both of these dangers the doctrine of man's trust in God which I have tried to state attempts to guard. Man knows God's character by God's conduct, and then interprets God's conduct by God's character. And if to each individual's observation of God's ways you add the observation of the race in all its generations, which the man who is in true sympathy with humanity may use in large degree as if it were his own, it does appear as if you had a doctrine out of which must come at once intelligence and reverence, - the culture of the watchful eye and of the trustful heart together; the possibility both of David's reasoning, "I will praise Him because He has dealt lovingly with me," and of Job's faith, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him."

It is interesting to see (as we have already seen to some extent) how this method of faith prevails in all the relations of the human mind to the objects of its trust. There is a possible confidence of soul in soul, won by the experience of the trusted soul's trustiness, which has again and again enabled one human being to say of another, "Though He slay me, I will trust Him still." Think of the old story in the Book of Genesis. See Abraham and Isaac - the father and the son - traveling together from the land of the Philistines to the mountain of Moriah, which God had showed to him. Behold the preparations for the sacrifice; hear the boy's artless and pathetic question, "Father, behold the fire and the wood! where is the lamb?" Then see how gradually the boy comes first to suspect and then to know of remonstrance. Isaac has learned long back to trust his father as one who knew the will of God; and so when Abraham looks him in the face and says to him, "God wills this, my son." the child's confidence bears the strain and does not falter. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," we can almost hear the boy say as we see him submit to be bound and to be laid upon the wood.

Turn for another instance to a later day in the same Jewish history. Remember how the "daughter of the warrior Gileadite" gave up her youth and hope and life in free acceptance of her father's will. Jephthah, her father, had vowed that he would offer to the Lord whatever first came out to meet him when he returned victorious. We need not sympathize with the reckless folly of the vow in order to feel the beauty of the self-consecration with which his child accepted for herself its dreadful consequences. The poet has unfolded the simple pathos of the Bible story and made us feel the honor for him who by all his loving care had deserved the trust with which the maiden sings from the land that lies beyond the pain of dying:

"My God, my land, my father, these did move
Me from my bliss of life that Nature gave,
Lowered softly with a threefold cord of love
Down to a silent grave.
It comforts me in this one thought to dwell,
That I subdued me to my father's will,
Because the kiss he gave me e'er I fell
Sweetens the spirit still."

There is a faith that not merely welcomes the fatal blow but remains even after the blow has done its work. "Though He slay me, yet do I trust Him."

~Phillips Brooks~

(continued with # 4)