Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

Yet God's heart shrinks from those sharp penalties that come to cure us of our sins. See, what happened the instant those Israelites returned to Him, ignominiously crying to the very Moses, and the very God, they had cast off and grumbled at, to come and save them.

Ay, but God is more eager than they. Make the brazen serpent, lose not a moment. Set it up on high, and tell them that one look is enough, and they shall live. That is Godlike; that is how God forgives. Why did God bid Moses make the brazen serpent and set it up on that pole? God could have healed these men by telling them to look up even in any way. Why precisely the brazen serpent should be the instrument of their cure I do not know; the Bible does not tell me. I can only tell you a thought that has come to me about it. Perhaps it was for this reason: It would be surely the thought of every dying Hebrew who looked at that serpent and felt a new life pulsing through all his veins, and the pain of death vanishing away, that that serpent came from God, and was a very token and proof of the warm heart-love of God to him. But it would not be so easy for the man that had been bitten and lay there dying to think of that fiery serpent that bit him as a messenger of God's love. He would be more likely to think that the fiery serpent, that came with death in his bite, was from the devil. And yet the serpent that bit him to death came from God, and came from God's love as absolutely as the serpent that healed. Is not that it? Could they but put two and two together, would not the thought flash into their heart, "A serpent God gave to heal; a serpent it was that hurt"? Is it then so, that the serpent that harmed came from God's love, as much as the serpent that healed? Is not that just God's way with you? Do not many of you sitting in the church to-day remember great sorrows or sharp blows of disaster that came into your life, and at first you writhed against them and were in great pain? You could not think there was any love of God in them; but they have lain there and they have made your heart more gentle, they have made your faith more strong, they have brought God nearer to you, they have made you kinder in your own home, and you look at them now with the glow of a goodness that has grown from them, and you say to yourself that not merely the goodness that has followed since, but the pain that came and hurt was from God—from God who is love.

How did the healing come to the dying Hebrew who looked at the brazen serpent? Not from any efficacy in the serpent, not from any magical virtue in the look; the new life that came to him came direct from God. Why, then, did God interpose the looking at the serpent? Why did God make the cure dependent on a gaze at a serpent erected there by Moses? I will tell you why. It was not the look; it was the change of heart that was in the look that God wanted. The real mischief that had to be undone was not the bodily death of those men; there was a worse evil than that, there was the loss of faith in God, the fracture of a loving dependence on God. That is the essence of all sin. Sin is disobedience to God. It means that you snatch your life out of God's hand, that you will not live according to God's will, that you make yourself your God; you will be your own master, you will take your own way—you can do better for yourself than God. Now, mark, you never would choose that sinful course as long as you trusted God. Loss of faith, that is sin. It is no good talking of cures, no good talking of salvation, unless you undo the mischief done by sin. Loss of faith: that is the beginning, the essence, the end of sin. Ah! that doctrine of salvation through faith that men mock at and call a legal sophism, it has got the heart of all truth in it, only I think we are to blame that we have so much talked of faith as the means of salvation as if it were some external condition attached by God to salvation. Faith is salvation; Jesus Christ hangs there on the cross as Moses lifted up the brazen serpent. The moment a man believes on Him he is saved from sin. How? Through some magical virtue in the cross, in the Body hanging there, in the blood poured out, or in the man's mental act of faith? Never, never. That Christ hanging there is the living embodiment of faith in God: His life, His death, are the incarnate declaration that all sin is error, that all sin is an outrage, that men erred and went wrong when they disobeyed God. He condemns all sin by His life of holiness, by His death of antagonism against sin, hanging there on the cross, wrestling with sin, seeking to undo it, offering to God the world's love and obedience that sinful men have failed to give to God, dying in their stead, obeying in their stead, making Himself a perfect sacrifice and substitute for this world of ours. All that still would not be salvation, is not salvation, to you until the sight of it turns you, regenerates you, makes you see that all your sin was madness, folly; fills you with hatred of it. When once the love of God binds you over to follow that Christ in obedience to God, in trust to God, in love of God, that is faith in Christ, that is salvation.

That serpent became an object of idolatrous and superstitious worship. It was very natural, and it is very evil. Hezekiah with his reforming zeal took it, and with real reverence, though with seeming external irreverence, dashed it in pieces. Has not that also a parallel, hundreds of parallels in Church history? Hezekiah rightly interpreted the heart of God; he believed that the great heart of God up there in heaven was pained every time that a poor ignorant Israelite, man or woman, poured out on that brazen image the gratitude that should have gone direct to Him. And so it is that in the Church's story you find that whenever priests have set up any channel or means of actual grace divine, grace supernatural, and have attached to it undue reverence, and made it bulk too largely in the eyes and worship of common men and women, so as to come between them and God, then God has raised up infidels and unbelievers to break it and dash it to pieces. Was not that what was done by the Reformers? At the Reformation, when the Mass had been set between eager longing hearts of men and women seeking forgiveness and the great loving heart of God that gives it, it was taken and shattered. Ay, and when this Bible of ours—this Protestant Bible of ours, or our great evangelical doctrines, are taken and have given to them a place of importance in our salvation and in our belief that they ought not to have, once again be sure of it God will create a true, lawful, and blessed recoil, and you will have these sacred things even dashed down to a position of undue depreciation. It is God's ways of leading us to Himself. Ah! there is a grand thought in that—the unutterable glory about our God that shines for me through all the tale of that great battle about belief, and doctrines, and Church institutions that makes up the Church's story—through it all what I see is the heart of God our Father longing for the touch of our hands in His hands, the gaze of our eyes into His, giving us things that shall help us to Him, lesson books to teach us about Him, steps that shall lead us to His feet. But the moment we make these a barrier that keeps us far from Him, things sacred and good are dashed away. What does that mean? It means to you and me the revelation in all wonder, awe, and comfort of how tender, near, and true and clinging is the love of God's heart to you and me—of that God whom we sometimes think so awful and so terrible, but who in His inmost being through and through is love, wholly, absolutely love.

VIII.
THE GRADATIONS OF DOUBT.

Psalm lxxiii.

I AM going to ask you to study with me this morning the 73rd Psalm. Before I read the Psalm I had better tell you what it is about; then you will follow the line of thought in it with greater ease. The central faith of the Hebrew religion was that God governs this world according to the principles of morality, that He is on the side of goodness, and against wickedness. The facts of life clashed with that dogma of Hebrew faith. Good men in those old times found it as hard to believe in God and goodness as we do, and they got just as little, or just as much, supernatural help as we do. Therefore they could nowhere find an absolute certainty; they nowhere received from heaven a supernatural and complete explanation of the enigmas of life. God, because He loved them, deliberately left them to fight their battle for faith with the actual facts and the actual difficulties. He left them constantly trying to find a complete intellectual solution of the problem, and failing to do that, just as we fail; and so He shut them up to discovering a resting-place for faith in the heart when they could not get it in the head. A great many psalms have welled out of men's hearts, just like fountains away among the hills, and valleys, and slopes. This 73rd Psalm is brimful of human thoughts, and duties, and longings, pains, and battles, and victories, just like bits of your life when you were all alive to the real grandeur of your human existence, when your heart longed to think loftily of life, and to hold fast to God, and precisely because your heart was all alive you found it was not easy. I am going to ask you to follow this man's struggle against doubt, to watch the steps by which he descended into the valley of real questioning of God's goodness and of God's government of the world, and then to trace the steps by which he climbed back again to a hill-top of serene and tranquil certainty.

I have already indicated to you that I do not think that anywhere in the Old Testament, or in the New Testament, or in all Christian theology or philosophy, does there exist a complete demonstration of the fact that God is good, and that He is on the side of goodness. Whether that is true or not every intelligent believer will admit that this 73rd Psalm is no complete theodicy. It will not hold its own as a logical demonstration that the government of this world is moral or just. The man's certainty that there is a good God, and that God takes sides with good men, rests not upon sight, but upon faith; it is a solution of the heart, not of the head. Thank God! that is the universal law of religious experience. One thing I want to point out to you at the beginning, especially to those of you who are thinkers, and who study the various religions of the world. There is a very simple characteristic about the fashion in which the problem of life is dealt with in those Psalms, when we compare them, say, with the very finest of Greek devotion and Greek religion. In all Greek philosophy there is only one fixed quantity—that is, the world. The problem of Greek thought is this: Given the world, the clear, solid, certain fact, to find the God that made it. They took life as it stood, and from its elements and components they tried to determine what kind of a Maker this world has had. Now, at the very outset, all through Hebrew religious thought and philosophy, you find two fixed quantities. There is the world, but over against it there is God—God, holy, just, righteous; and therefore, while the Greek problem was always, Given the world, to construct God, the Hebrew problem is, Given the world as it exists, and given God as He exists, can those be reconciled? It is a very simple and striking contrast. I will tell you the picturesque aspect that it gives to the two literatures. Greek thought is all philosophical, speculative—great minds rising back to the First Cause, from this actual world; and this world being what it is, no wonder that at one time they reached iron Fate, at another time Materialism, at another time Pantheism, at another time Manichæism. Hebrew thought does not sway about in that fashion; it is simply concerned with this—the vindication of God's character; and there is the striking contrast. In Greek poetry, in all Pagan poetry, you will find warm-hearted, large-minded men contemplating life, with all its great wrongs, injustices, pains, sorrows, disappointments, and then breaking into pity and compassion for men. In Hebrew poetry, in Hebrew religion, you will everywhere find the same dark aspects of life fearlessly held up, acknowledged, and confronted; but what do you think is the supreme pain that breaks in upon the hearts of the Hebrew sages and seers as they contemplate the world's enigmas? It is anxiety for the character of God. It is not pity for poor men and women, ground under the wheels of this earth, but a terribly agonising question, "How can we defend God and God's goodness when the world is so evil and so dark?" Ah, you want to prove what the Bible is by its own light, to show that it has a right to be spoken of as a revelation and as inspired! Do not go to all the trivial Mediæval theories and doctrines about it; go to the book itself, and go to the world. It can hold its own, without claiming anything outside to buttress it up. Set the heart-life in it against the heart-life of any other religion, and you will see that it has the blue of God's heaven in it—unsullied, splendid, perfect. Now, I am going to take this one Psalm—to take one glimpse into that long, painful chemistry of revelation, as God came into human hearts with pain and perplexity, with struggle, with triumph, with glory, and made those hearts know Him, not through explanations, but by His indwelling in them, His life, His love, His holiness, echoing and throbbing into their heart life.

I am now tempted to break off here for a moment, and say to you what always strikes me when I look at that aspect of this revealed, inspired Bible—that it does seem just possible that the good Christian Church we belong to in our time is not in quite the right way of thinking about religious doubt. I am not talking about doubt of the head, the intellect, and the schools—intellectual fence, that sort of triviality; let it alone, it is not worth taking notice of. But the real doubt of any age, the doubt of any man's heart and head—what are we to think of that? Are we to stamp it as devilish? Are we to denounce it, and excommunicate it? Why, we might be fighting against God. If I read my Bible aright, real, genuine, patient struggle for faith means just the birth-throes of God's revelation of Himself in men's hearts. Now come to this point, and see what it reveals to you that is sacred, pathetic, instructive in the heart of a man dead hundreds of years ago. Look into his heart, and you may learn a great deal about your own heart. The problem that confronts him is the fact that has always been very evident in every age, that honesty is not by any means always the best policy, if by that you mean that it pays you best. I am putting it in homely language. It is a big question. Do the world's good things go predominantly to the good men? or do they go to the clever and unscrupulous men? In the professions is it your honest, truthful man, of modest merit, that succeeds best, or your humbug, impostor, flatterer, self-advertiser? In the State, in politics, is it your honest man, that speaks truths to the people, that is lauded and flattered? or is it your skilful adventurer? In the City does strict honour make a man's fortune? or are profits bigger in proportion as a man can wink at things? Anywhere on the large scale are the virtuous classes the most prosperous? Are the powers of this world raised up to their lofty elevation by goodness, or rather in spite of badness? Is God on the side of goodness? or does He not care? or is He rather on the side of violence, and wrong, and wickedness? Now, this point is the real struggle in the poet's heart, to solve that difficulty of life. I am going to read it to you, giving you the headings of the various parts of it, the steps of emotion and of thought through which his heart has passed.