Jeremiah 29:8-13 For thus said the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Let not your prophets and your diviners, that be in the middle of you, deceive you… To search after God is really to educate oneself. To know God requires that we should be educated in the Divine qualities. The knowledge of God is not something outside of us, and far removed from us. It is revealed in us, and by some quality that is within us. Now, to search after God has always been considered or spoken of as a work involving the expenditure of great zeal and intensity; and the question arises, Is it so difficult for men to know God? Fellowship and a knowledge of God are the food of the soul; they are the conditions of a true and large manhood; and axe we pushed so far from Him by the intrinsic difficulties of knowledge that we cannot know Him? We surely can know God by the use of our ordinary senses so far as He is made manifest in the exterior world, as the Maker, as the Sustainer, as the Architect, and the Engineer; we behold what He is by what He has done; and yet, we have thus approached but a very little way toward Him. Can we, then, by sitting down to contemplation, can we by any such method as that of the laboratory, or that analysis which the philosopher employs, draw out a more perfect knowledge of God? Only in after stages, and only in a subsidiary sphere, can men gain knowledge by the internal philosophical method. It succeeds other methods, and methods of more importance. So the difficulty of searching after God is real; but it is not the kind of difficulty which men suspect. It is not that God is purposely hidden. It is because the overruling of our lower nature, the subjugation of pride, the restraint of vanity, the putting down of avarice, the overcoming of the fever of ambition, and the regulation of the passions — it is because these things are so difficult, that the strife and the seeking are made necessary by the required formation of a God-like nature in ourselves; for we shall see God only through so much of the impartation of the Divine nature as is given to us and received by us, The Divine qualities — the qualities of truth, justice, mercy, long-suffering, love, kindness, self-sacrifice, disinterested benevolence — these can be appreciated only by those who have something of them in themselves; and when we seek after God to know Him, we are seeking really to know ourselves, and to fashion ourselves. It is a work of self-education through which we come to a knowledge of the supreme Being; and this does require searching. How, then, do men seek after God? They have been told that the knowledge of God, that the presence of God in their souls, is quite necessary for their safety in death, and for their remission from hell in the life that is to come; and out of the most selfish or the most superstitious feeling they often make a languid and feeble search after God purely for protective purposes — not from honour; not from love; not from conscious weakness to be impleted; not from a sense of their inferiority and a desire of aggrandisement by things that make nobility in the soul; not from any worthy purpose, but that they may have a barrier to keep off the avalanche of death. There are others who join with me in denouncing folly upon such, who are scarcely better, although they are frivolous in a higher mood. There are many who seek after God as poets seek after conceits. They love God as they love music; they love Him as they love the chant of the singer, or the effusion of the smooth-rhymed poet; and only thus do they seek after God. To them He is a vision; He is a floating cloud; He is a spring morning; He is a thundering sea; He is a landscape; He is a poem; but He is not Jehovah; He is not Father; He is not Governor, or Judge, or Rewarder. Well, there be others that seek after God, as a philosopher seeks after a proposition, disentangling intellectual conceptions, framing new ideas in some collected form into a speculative and philosophic God — a God of propositions; a God of attributes; a God of syllogisms; a logical God; a rhetorical God; a demonstrative, conceptional God. Whatever may come through the moulds of the intellect they employ in building up a bloodless God, a soulless God, a God of abstractions; and they think when they have hedged Him in with one and another and another distinction sharply drawn, and have clearly rounded out their conception, that they have sought after God, and that they have found Him — and God laughs. For who by such searching can find out God; as if a man who never talked with you, who never walked with you, who never worked with you, who never lived with you, and who was never loved by you; as if one that had no personal acquaintance with you could ever out of his own consciousness deduce a correct idea of what you are! Searching for God with one's heart is the way to find Him out; for God is discerned by the heart. That is the temple in the soul of God; and only they that enter into the searching of God by the heart can come near to Him or know Him. All they who seek after God then, irresolutely, occasionally, with fluctuating zeal, for selfish ends, dreamily, imaginatively, poetically, or by speculation and the lines of a dry philosophy — all such come short. They never can reproduce God. Only they who have framed in themselves some conception of high moral qualities, and have learned out of their own experience to frame a notion of God for the sake of making that notion their governor, their schoolmaster — only they can reproduce God. Frame a conception of God as of a Father full of pitifulness, full of tenderness, full of gentleness, full of wrath, but wrath that protects; full of severity, but the severity of a father for the cleansing of his son; frame a conception of God as reigning not to destroy but to recover, not to beat down but to lift up, not to shut men in prisons but to open the prison-doors, not to weld shackles or to impose them, hut to break them; frame a conception of God which is eminent in characteristics of motherhood, and give to it the magnitude of infinity; and then when these moral qualities are once established in thy sympathy and in thy thought, and magnified by the imagination, and lifted into the heavenly sphere, and thou mayest bow down before it, and say to it, "Thou God of reason, Thou God of compassion, Thou God of infinite love, Thou God whose thoughts rain bounty, Thou God who livest not for Thyself but for Thy creatures, Thee I behold; to Thee I submit, because Thou art infinitely good beyond all conception- Thee I worship and Thee I obey." And then, having framed some such initial conception of God, be thou trained into the same likeness, and develop in thyself whatever is in harmony with this image of the Creator. You find portrayed in the Gospels the mind and will of God. That men may know Him personally, four lives are given of the Lord Jesus Christ, besides the interpretations and comments that are found in the letters and epistles. Study earnestly that slight yet wonderful sketch and portraiture of this superior Being. Keep it before your mind until you have a distinct conception of the personality of the Lord Jesus Christ. The critical and determinative question with you is this-Wilt thou have such an One to rule over you? Are you willing to lift, in your conception, into the heavenly places, such an idea of God as you derive from the Lord Jesus Christ? Are you willing to say, "Thy will, and not mine, be done"? Are you willing to take this oath and covenant of allegiance, never to be broken, "I dedicate my life to the fulfilment of Thy commands, and to the development in myself of Thy disposition"? If you are, you have found your God. The moment you have this conception of a loving Being, with a determinate moral character, who requires of you a corresponding moral character, and the moment there is in you a genuine volition and purpose to love and obey such an One, the work is begun, and you have been introduced to your Master. Now, after that, the very first step which you take in your attempt to act justly, you will be environed by the bands and hoops of society; by its imperfections; by the injustice which custom always imposes; and you will have a conflict with the prevailing tendencies by which you are surrounded. Your large and Christian conception of justice will stand in marked contrast with the contracted and worldly conception of justice which is prevalent; and you will become a reformer; and you will feel, "I must take up my cross; and if I follow Christ I must suffer." Yes, you must suffer if you would enjoy. Not that you are to suffer as if religion itself were a suffering, for religion itself is just the opposite; but you are coming out of a state of ignorance and bondage into a state of knowledge and freedom. You are going toward the right; and having once come to the right, it will be a blessing; for the right is s reward in over-measure. Your first impulse should be to act beneficently; and there is to be a power of beneficence in your soul. You should have a feeling that you are not your own. You that are strong should bear with the weak. You should carry one another's burdens. You should manifest towards your fellow-men the disposition of love. Working out, then, your conception of God little by little; gathering conceptions of the Divine Being from all that is good and high and noble in practical life, and bringing back to yourself as motives in your own soul corresponding qualities, that your nature in its measure may become like God, growing in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, you will find that your sense of the Divine Presence purifies itself, cleanses itself, augments itself, makes itself more and more powerful, until the time comes in which you can say, literally, "I walk with God. My God made the heavens and the earth He is a God of force, and a God of tranquillity. My God is father and mother to my thought. He is all that is transcendent in patience and meekness and goodness; and not because He is inert; not because He is weak; for He will by no means clear the guilty. He upholds the right. He stands for the oppressed. He is a God who is determined that good shall prevail as against evil. But He works with a mother-heart, by tears, by groans, by death itself. He gives Himself for the poor, and the outcast, and the sinful, and the needy. He bore our sins in His own body; and by His stripes we are healed." (H. W. Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Let not your prophets and your diviners, that be in the midst of you, deceive you, neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed. |
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