DOES GOD HAVE FAIR-PLAY?
A professor in one of our colleges, who is an acknowledged authority on the prophets of the Old Testament, gave a course of lectures lately on his own subject to a summer school of theology. His aim in one of these prelections was to show how the prophet Jeremiah developed himself by debate and discussion with God. At its close an elderly clergyman, shaking the lecturer by the hand, said to him: "I was delighted to hear what you said about Jeremiah. I myself have for forty years preached the right and duty of men to stand up to their Maker."
It was, to say the least, a crude way of expressing himself; but the man had a meaning, and I think I know what it was. We may, to a large extent, have grown out of the old Calvinistic representation of God; but its reflex influence abides in a greater degree than we perhaps realize. This representation puts its emphasis, not so much upon the Fatherhood as upon the Sovereignty of God. It holds man responsible for the moral quality of his actions to God; but all reference to man's claims upon God are met with the stern question: "Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?"
Whatever the Apostle may have meant, this question has been used to support an intolerable position, and the clergyman spoke out his revolt against it. His divinely implanted instinct of justice assured him that a God, who is to command our intellectual confidence and heart-trust, must, while exercising the prerogatives of a Sovereign, accept the responsibilities of a Father. Family life would break all to pieces if we as fathers did not carry our recognition of the claims and rights of children past a severe, however just, parental authority and control into the larger realm of wise liberty and undoubted affection. And it is out of the best and highest we know of our relations to one another, that we are to understand what we ought to be to God, and what God has promised to be to us.
For God not only affirms His responsibility to us, He challenges us to say, whether, having done our part, we have weighed His part in the balance and found it wanting. It is the declaration of the Scriptures from beginning to end, that the Lord our God is a faithful God. Through the mouth of one of His prophets He confronts us with a question which, were it not His own question, would hurt us as almost profane: "What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me?"
We need not shrink, therefore, from talking reverently about the responsibility of God, for He asks us to build our trust, not only in His promises, but upon our experience of the faithfulness with which He has kept His promises. What, then, is our testimony? Has God been faithful to us; and if so, are we justified in assuming that the same faithfulness is the experience of others?
"Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God." Take this affirmation on its lowest grounds—as touching material things. It is not said that man does not live by bread, when it is said that he lives not by bread alone. We may insist upon it, that material concerns are not worthy to be compared with the things of the spirit; but this does not affect the truth, that while we are on this planet we must have material things. Jesus has told us that, "Our Heavenly Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him." It does not follow that the things we desire are the things we need. Christ does not pledge the divine faithfulness to our desires; it is pledged to our needs.
And how is it redeemed, even in the case of the latter? Think for a moment of the poverty there is amid all our plenty. Think of the evils and misery that are the consequence as well as the cause of poverty. There are thousands of men, and women, and children dying every year in India from want and sheer starvation. We are told that, in each case, a penny a day would mean comparative plenty. They are God's creatures, willing, and indeed eager, to work themselves to skin and bone for a penny a day, and they cannot earn it. Think again of the untold human beings nearer home, locked in a warfare from which there is no discharge but death; the grim struggle for a bare existence, with its chances at every turn of sickness, accident, no work, and then the abyss. When we have reckoned off the probable proportion of those who have done much to make the conditions in which they find themselves, we have a large percentage of people who are no more responsible for the poverty and suffering they have to endure than they are responsible for the fact that they are in the world which uses them so harshly.
For my part I can offer no explanation of these things, that can give a sensitive heart and an honest mind more than a very moderate degree of satisfaction. There are communities, and even races of people, whose existence in this world appears to have no immediate relation to their own personal happiness and well-being. They come and pass away as phases of what we must believe is an evolution towards higher things. But this is the question: Have they who compose this lonely and sombre procession no claims upon their Maker in the meanwhile?
I do not believe that one human soul will fail of absolute, abundant, and rich compensation, in those eternal years that are at God's right hand. I have a word to say about this later, but for the present I may say that I answer many questions by my conviction that what we call death does not end all. Columbus is reported to have said: "I must have another continent to keep the earth's balance true." And I must have the personal conscious future, which is to right the wrongs of the ages, if I am to believe and preach the faithfulness of God. But we must guard against an impatience which is our littleness. In the immense times of the Almighty, every dark mystery of human being can move away, and leave the "sky of Providence at last, arching over the soul with not a cloud to dim its stars." For my present faith I hold it true with one who trusts—