It was Canon Holmes, of India, who more than twenty-five years ago
called attention to the inferential character of the average man's faith
in God. To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a
deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains
personally unknown to the individual. `He must be,' they say, `therefore
we believe He is.' Others do not go even so far as this; they know of
Him only by hearsay. They have never bothered to think the matter out
for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and have put
belief in Him into the back of their minds along with the various odds
and ends that make up their total creed. To many others God is but an
ideal, another name for goodness, or beauty, or truth; or He is law, or
life, or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence. These
notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have one
thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience. The
possibility of intimate acquaintance with Him has not entered their
minds. While admitting His existence they do not think of Him as
knowable in the sense that we know things or people.
Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. Their
creed requires them to believe in the personality of God, and they have
been taught to pray, `Our Father, which art in heaven.' Now personality
and fatherhood carry with them the idea of the possibility of personal
acquaintance. This is admitted, I say, in theory, but for millions of
Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the
non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal
to a mere principle.
Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural
doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving
Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden
and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is
present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself
whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to
receive the manifestation.
The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at
least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or
thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms
are used to express the knowledge of God as are used to express
knowledge of physical things. `O taste and see that the Lord is good.'
(Ps 34:8) `All thy garments smellof myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of
the ivory palaces.' (Ps 45:8) `My sheep hear my voice.' (Jn 10:27)
`Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' (Mt 5:8) These
are but four of countless such passages from the Word of God. And more
important than any proof text is the fact that the whole import of the
Scripture is toward this belief.
What can all this mean except that we have in our hearts organs by means
of which we can know God as certainly as we know material things through
our familiar five senses? We apprehend the physical world by exercising
the faculties given us for the purpose, and we possess spiritual
faculties by means of which we can know God and the spiritual world if
we will obey the Spirit's urge and begin to use them. That a saving work
must first be done in the heart is taken for granted here. The spiritual
faculties of the unregenerate man lie asleep in his nature, unused and
for every purpose dead; that is the stroke which has fallen upon us by
sin. They may be quickened to active life again by the operation of the
Holy Spirit in regeneration; that is one of the immeasurable benefits
which come to us through Christ's atoning work on the cross.
But the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so
little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the
Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith
enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the
result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual
things. This is the condition of vast numbers of Christians today. No
proof is necessary to support that statement. We have but to converse
with the first Christian we meet or enter the first church we find open
to acquire all the proof we need.
A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us,
altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize
it. God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This
eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon
its reality.
I have just now used two words which demand definition; or if definition
is impossible, I must at least make clear what I mean when I use them.
They are `reckon' and `reality.' What do I mean by reality? I mean that
which has existence apart from any idea any mind may have of it, and
which would exist if there were no mine anywhere to entertain a thought
of it. That which is real has being in itself. It does not depend upon
the observer for its validity.
I am aware that there are those who love to poke fun at the plain man's
idea of reality. They are the idealists who spin endless proofs that
nothing is real outside of the mind. They are the relativists who like
to show that there are no fixed points in the universe from which we can
measure anything. They smile down upon us from their lofty intellectual
peaks and settle us to their own satisfaction by fastening upon us the
reproachful term `absolutist.' The Christian is not put out of
countenance by this show of contempt. He can smile right back at them,
for he knows that there is only One who is Absolute, that is God. But he
knows also that the Absolute One has made this world for man's uses,
and, while there is nothing fixed or real in the last meaning of the
words (the meaning as applied to God) for every purpose of human life we
are permitted to act as if there were. And every man does act thus
except the mentally sick. These unfortunates also have trouble with
reality, but they are consistent; they insist upon living in accordance
with their ideas of things. They are honest, and it is their very
honesty that constitutes them a social problem.
The idealists and relativists are not mentally sick. They prove their
soundness by living their lives according to the very notions of reality
which they in theory repudiate and by counting upon the very fixed
points which they prove are not there. They could earn a lot more
respect for their notions if they were willing to live by them; but this
they are careful not to do. Their ideas are brain-deep, not life- deep.
Wherever life touches them they repudiate their theories and live like
other men.
The Christian is too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He
takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All
his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he
lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come.
From the insincere man he turns away.
The sincere plain man knows that the world is real. He finds it here
when he wakes to consciousness, and he knows that he did not think it
into being. It was here waiting for him when he came, and he knows that
when he prepares to leave this earthly scene it will be here still to
bid him good-bye as he departs. By the deep wisdom of life he is wiser
than a thousand men who doubt. He stands upon the earth and feels the
wind and rain in his face and he knows that they are real. He sees the
sun by day and the stars by night.
He sees the hot lightning play out of the dark thundercloud. He hears
the sounds of nature and the cries of human joy and pain. These he knows
are real. He lies down on the cool earth at night and has no fear that
it will prove illusory or fail him while he sleeps. In the morning the
firm ground will be under him, the blue sky above him and the rocks and
trees around him as when he closed his eyes the night before. So he
lives and rejoices in a world of reality. With his five senses he
engages this real world. All things necessary to his physical existence
he apprehends by the faculties with which he has been equipped by the
God who created him and placed him in such a world as this.
Now by our definition also God is real. He is real in the absolute and
final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon
His. The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and
dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including
ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any
notions which we may have concerning Him.The worshipping heart does not
create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral
slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Another word that must be cleared up is the word reckon. This does not
mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not
only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other.
Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach
reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that
which is already there. God and the spiritual world are real. We can
reckon upon them with as much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar
world around us. Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say
here) inviting our attention and challenging our trust.
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We
habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of
any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we
doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word. The world of
sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our
lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self- demonstrating. It does
not appeal to our faith; it is here, assaulting our five senses,
demanding to be accepted as real and final. But sin has so clouded the
lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of
God, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes
the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the
curse inherited by every member of Adam's tragic race.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The
object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality. Our uncorrected
thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural hearts and the
intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a contrast between
the spiritual and the real; but actually no such contrast exists. The
antithesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the imaginary, between
the spiritual and the material, between the temporal and the eternal;
but between the spiritual and the real.
The spiritual is real. If we would rise into that region of light and
power plainly beckoning us through the Scriptures of truth we must break
the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest
from the seen to the unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. `He
that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of
them that diligently seek him.' (Hebr 11:6) This is basic in the life of
faith. From there we can rise to unlimited heights. `Ye believe in God,'
said our Lord Jesus Christ, `believe also in me.' (John 14:1) Without
the first there can be no second.
If we truly want to follow God we must seek to be other-worldly. This I
say knowing well that that word has been used with scorn by the sons of
this world and applied to the Christian as a badge of reproach. So be
it. Everyman must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all
the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose
the Kingdom of God as our sphere of interest I see no reason why anyone
should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain we rob
no one by so doing.
The `other world,' which is the object of this world's disdain and the
subject of the drunkard's mocking song, is our carefully chosen goal and
the object of our holiest longing. But we must avoid the common fault of
pushing the `other world' into the future. It is not future, but
present. It parallels our familiar physical world, and the doors between
the two worlds are open. `Ye are come,' says the writer to the Hebrews
(and the tense is plainly present), `unto Mount Zion, and unto the city
of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company
of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which
are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits
of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant,
and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of
Abel' (Hebr 12:22-24) All these things are contrasted with `the mount
that might be touched' and `the sound of a trumpet and the voice of
words' that might be heard. May we not safely conclude that, as the
realities of Mount Sinai were apprehended by the senses, so the
realities of Mount Zion are to be grasped by the soul? And this not by
any trick of the imagination, but in downright actuality. The soul has
eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Feeble they may be
from long disuse, but by the life-giving touch of Christ alive now and
capable of sharpest sight and most sensitive hearing.
As we begin to focus upon God the things of the spirit will take shape
before our inner eyes. Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an
inward revelation of the Godhead (John 14:21-23). It will give acute
perception enabling us to see God even as is promised to the pure in
heart. A new God-consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to
taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all.
There will be seen the constant shining of the light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world. (John 1:9) More and more, as our
faculties grow sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great
All, and His Presence the glory and wonder of our lives. O God, quicken
to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on eternal things.
Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable
me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make heaven more real to
me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen.