Unspoken Sermons

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Job's child-like judgment of God had never been vitiated and perverted,
to the dishonouring of the great Father, by any taint of such low
theories as, alas! we must call the popular: explanations of God's ways
by such as did not understand _Him_, they are acceptable to such as do
not care to know him, such as are content to stand afar off and stare
at the cloud whence issue the thunders and the voices; but a burden
threatening to sink them to Tophet, a burden grievous to be borne, to
such as would arise and go to the Father. The contradiction between
Job's idea of the justice of God and the things which had befallen him,
is constantly haunting him; it has a sting in it far worse than all the
other misery with which he is tormented; but it is not fixed in the
hopelessness of hell by an accepted explanation more frightful than
itself. Let the world-sphinx put as many riddles as she will, she can
devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer. Job
refused the explanation of his friends because he knew it false; to
have accepted such as would by many in the present day be given him,
would have been to be devoured at once of the monster. He simply holds
on to the skirt of God's garment--besieges his door--keeps putting his
question again and again, ever haunting the one source of true answer
and reconciliation. No answer will do for him but the answer that God
only can give; for who but God can justify God's ways to his creature?

From a soul whose very consciousness is contradiction, we must not look
for logic; misery is rarely logical; it is itself a discord; yet is it
nothing less than natural that, _feeling_ as if God wronged him, Job
should yet be ever yearning after a sight of God, straining into his
presence, longing to stand face to face with him. He would confront the
One. He is convinced, or at least cherishes as his one hope the idea,
that, if he could but get God to listen to him, if he might but lay his
case clear before him, God would not fail to see how the thing was, and
would explain the matter to him--would certainly give him peace; the
man in the ashes would know that the foundations of the world yet stand
sure; that God has not closed his eyes, or--horror of all horrors--
ceased to be just! Therefore would he order his words before him, and
hear what God had to say; surely the Just would set the mind of his
justice-loving creature at rest!

His friends, good men, religious men, but of the pharisaic type--that
is, men who would pay their court to God, instead of coming into his
presence as children; men with traditional theories which have served
their poor turn, satisfied their feeble intellectual demands, they
think others therefore must accept or perish; men anxious to appease
God rather than trust in him; men who would rather receive salvation
from God, than God their salvation--these his friends would persuade
Job to the confession that he was a hypocrite, insisting that such
things could not have come upon him but because of wickedness, and as
they knew of none open, it must be for some secret vileness. They grow
angry with him when he refuses to be persuaded against his knowledge of
himself. They insist on his hypocrisy, he on his righteousness. Nor may
we forget that herein lies not any overweening on the part of Job, for
the poem prepares us for the right understanding of the man by telling
us in the prologue, that God said thus to the accuser of men: 'Hast
thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the
earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and
escheweth evil?' God gives Job into Satan's hand with confidence in the
result; and at the end of the trial approves of what Job has said
concerning himself. But the very appearance of God is enough to make
Job turn against himself: his part was to have trusted God altogether,
in spite of every appearance, in spite of every reality! He will
justify himself no more. He sees that though God has not been punishing
him for his sins, yet is he far from what he ought to be, and must
become: 'Behold,' he says, 'I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will
lay mine hand upon my mouth.'

But let us look a little closer at Job's way of thinking and speaking
about God, and his manner of addressing him--so different from the
pharisaic in all ages, in none more than in our own.

Waxing indignant at the idea that his nature required such treatment--
'Am I a sea or a whale,' he cries out, 'that thou settest a watch over
me?' _Thou knowest that I am not wicked_. 'Thou settest a print upon
the heels of my feet!'--_that the way I have gone may be known by my
footprints!_ To his friends he cries: 'Will ye speak wickedly for God?
and talk deceitfully for him?' _Do you not know that I am the man I
say?_ 'Will ye accept His person?'--_siding with Him against me?_ 'Will
ye contend for God?'--_be special pleaders for him, his partisains_?
'Is it good that He should search you out? or as one man mocketh
another, do ye so mock Him?'--_saying what you do not think_? 'He will
surely reprove you, if ye do secretly accept persons!'--_even the
person of God himself_!

Such words are pleasing in the ear of the father of spirits. He is not
a God to accept the flattery which declares him above obligation to his
creatures; a God to demand of them a righteousness different from his
own; a God to deal ungenerously with his poverty-stricken children; a
God to make severest demands upon his little ones! Job is confident of
receiving justice. There is a strange but most natural conflict of
feeling in him. His faith is in truth profound, yet is he always
complaining. It is but the form his faith takes in his trouble. Even
while he declares the hardness and unfitness of the usage he is
receiving, he yet seems assured that, to get things set right, all he
needs is admission to the presence of God--an interview with the Most
High. To be heard must be to have justice. He uses language which, used
by any living man, would horrify the religious of the present day, in
proportion to the lack of truth in them, just as it horrified his three
friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was
'doctrine' and rebuke. God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the
freedom of his speech:--he has always been seeking such as Job to
worship him. It is those who know only and respect the outsides of
religion, such as never speak or think of God but as the _Almighty_ or
_Providence_, who will say of the man who would go close up to God, and
speak to him out of the deepest in the nature he has made, 'he is
irreverent.' To utter the name of God in the drama--highest of human
arts, is with such men blasphemy. They pay court to God, not love him;
they treat him as one far away, not as the one whose bosom is the only
home. They accept God's person. 'Shall not his excellency'--another
thing quite than that you admire--'make you afraid? Shall not his
dread'--another thing quite than that to which you show your pagan
respect--'fall upon you?'

In the desolation of this man, the truth of God seems to him, yet more
plainly than hitherto, the one thing that holds together the world
which by the word of his mouth came first into being. If God be not
accessible, nothing but despair and hell are left the man so lately the
greatest in the east. Like a child escaping from the dogs of the
street, he flings the door to the wall, and rushes, nor looks behind
him, to seek the presence of the living one. Bearing with him the
burden of his death, he cries, 'Look what thou hast laid upon me! Shall
mortal man, the helpless creature thou hast made, bear cross like
this?' He would cast his load at the feet of his maker!--God is the God
of comfort, known of man as the refuge, the life-giver, or not known at
all. But alas! he cannot come to him! Nowhere can he see his face! He
has hid himself from him! 'Oh that I knew where I might find him! that
I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him, and
fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which he would
answer me, and understand what he would say unto me. Will he plead
against me with his great power? No! but he would put strength in me.
There the righteous might dispute with him; so should I be delivered
for ever from my judge. Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and
backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, where he doth
work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand,
that I cannot see him: but he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath
tried me, I shall come forth as gold.'

He cannot find him! Yet is he in his presence all the time, and his
words enter into the ear of God his Saviour.

The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against
all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but
God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that he
implies, if he does not actually say, that God _owes_ something to his
creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all--that
God owes _himself_ to the creature he has made in his image, for so he
has made him incapable of living without him. This, his creatures'
highest claim upon him, is his divinest gift to them. For the
fulfilling of this their claim he has sent his son, that he may
himself, the father of him and of us, follow into our hearts. Perhaps
the worst thing in a theology constructed out of man's dull _possible_,
and not out of the being and deeds and words of Jesus Christ, is the
impression it conveys throughout that God acknowledges no such
obligation. Are not we the clay, and he the potter? how can the clay
claim from the potter? We are the clay, it is true, but _his_ clay, but
spiritual clay, live clay, with needs and desires--and _rights_; we are
clay, but clay worth the Son of God's dying for, that it might learn to
consent to be shaped unto honour. We can have no merits--a _merit_ is a
thing impossible; but God has given us rights. Out of him we have
nothing; but, created by him, come forth from him, we have even rights
towards him--ah, never, never _against_ him! his whole desire and
labour is to make us capable of claiming, and induce us to claim of him
the things whose rights he bestowed in creating us. No claim had we to
be created: that involves an absurdity; but, being made, we have claims
on him who made us: our needs are our claims. A man who will not
provide for the hunger of his child, is condemned by the whole world.

'Ah, but,' says the partisan of God, 'the Almighty stands in a relation
very different from that of an earthly father: there is no parallel.' I
grant it: there is no parallel. The man did not create the child, he
only yielded to an impulse created in himself: God is infinitely more
bound to provide for _his_ child than any man is to provide for his.
The relation is infinitely, divinely closer. It is God to whom every
hunger, every aspiration, every desire, every longing of our nature is
to be referred; he made all our needs--made us the creatures of a
thousand necessities--and have we no claim on him? Nay, we have claims
innumerable, infinite; and his one great claim on us is that we should
claim our claims of him.

It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in the way of appeal
to his righteousness. How should he be righteous without owing us
anything? How would there be any right for the judge of all the earth
to do if he owed nothing? Verily he owes us nothing that he does not
pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection and
disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every
act of his being he lays himself under obligation to his creatures. Oh,
the grandeur of his goodness, and righteousness, and fearless
unselfishness! When doubt and dread invade, and the voice of love in
the soul is dumb, what can please the father of men better than to hear
his child cry to him from whom he came, 'Here I am, O God! Thou hast
made me: give me that which thou hast made me needing.' The child's
necessity, his weakness, his helplessness, are the strongest of all his
claims. If I am a whale, I can claim a sea; if I am a sea, I claim room
to roll, and break in waves after my kind; if I am a lion, I seek my
meat from God; am I a child, this, beyond all other claims, I claim--
that, if any of my needs are denied me, it shall be by the love of a
father, who will let me see his face, and allow me to plead my cause
before him. And this must be just what God desires! What would he have,
but that his children should claim their father? To what end are all
his dealings with them, all his sufferings with and for and in them,
but that they should claim their birthright? Is not their birthright
what he made them for, made in them when he made them? Is it not what
he has been putting forth his energy to give them ever since first he
began them to be--the divine nature, God himself? The child has, and
must have, a claim on the father, a claim which it is the joy of the
father's heart to acknowledge. A created need is a created claim. God
is the origin of both need and supply, the father of our necessities,
the abundant giver of the good things. Right gloriously he meets the
claims of his child! The story of Jesus is the heart of his answer, not
primarily to the prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children
he has sent out into his universe.

Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, an adorable
creator, doing anything less than he has done for his children! that
any other kind of being than Jesus Christ could have been worthy of
all-glorifying worship! that his nature demanded less of him than he
has done! that his nature is not absolute love, absolute
self-devotion--could have been without these highest splendours!

In the light of this truth, let us then look at the words at the head
of this sermon: '_Oh that thou wouldest hide me in the grave_!' Job
appeals to his creator, whom his sufferings compel him to regard as
displeased with him, though he knows not why. _We_ know he was not
displeased but Job had not read the preface to his own story. He prays
him to hide him, and forget him for a time, that the desire of the
maker to look again upon the creature he had made, to see once more the
work of his hands, may awake within him; that silence and absence and
loss may speak for the buried one, and make the heart of the parent
remember and long after the face of the child; then 'thou shalt call
and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine
hands;' then will he rise in joy, to plead with confidence the cause of
his righteousness. For God is nigher to the man than is anything God
has made: what can be closer than the making and the made? that which
is, and that which is because the other is? that which wills, and that
which answers, owing to the will, the heart, the desire of the other,
its power to answer? What other relation imaginable could give claims
to compare with those arising from such a relation? God must love his
creature that looks up to him with hungry eyes--hungry for life, for
acknowledgment, for justice, for the possibilities of living that life
which the making life has made him alive for the sake of living. The
whole existence of a creature is a unit, an entirety of claim upon his
creator:--just _therefore_, let him do with me as he will--even to
seating me in the ashes, and seeing me scrape myself with a potsherd!--
not the less but ever the more will I bring forward my claim! assert
it--insist on it--assail with it the ear and the heart of the father.
Is it not the sweetest music ear of maker can hear?--except the word of
perfect son, 'Lo, I come to do thy will, O God!' We, imperfect sons,
shall learn to say the same words too: that we may grow capable and say
them, and so enter into our birthright, yea, become partakers of the
divine nature in its divinest element, that Son came to us--died for
the slaying of our selfishness, the destruction of our mean hollow
pride, the waking of our childhood. We are his father's debtors for our
needs, our rights, our claims, and he will have us pay the uttermost
farthing. Yes, so true is the Father, he will even compel us, through
misery if needful, to put in our claims, for he knows we have eternal
need of these things: without the essential rights of his being, who
can live?

I protest, therefore, against all such teaching as, originating in and
fostered by the faithlessness of the human heart, gives the impression
that the exceeding goodness of God towards man is not the natural and
necessary outcome of his being. The root of every heresy popular in the
church draws its nourishment merely and only from the soil of unbelief.
The idea that God would be God all the same, as glorious as he needed
to be, had he not taken upon himself the divine toil of bringing home
his wandered children, had he done nothing to seek and save the lost,
is false as hell. Lying for God could go no farther. As if the idea of
God admitted of his being less than he is, less than perfect, less than
all-in-all, less than Jesus Christ! less than Love absolute, less than
entire unselfishness! As if the God revealed to us in the New Testament
were not his own perfect necessity of loving-kindness, but one who has
made himself better than, by his own nature, by his own love, by the
laws which he willed the laws of his existence, he needed to be! They
would have it that, being unbound, he deserves the greater homage! So
it might be, if he were not our father. But to think of the living God
not as our father, but as one who has condescended greatly, being
nowise, in his own willed grandeur of righteous nature, bound to do as
he has done, is killing to all but a slavish devotion. It is to think
of him as nothing like the God we see in Jesus Christ.

It will be answered that we have fallen, and God is thereby freed from
any obligation, if any ever were. It is but another lie. No amount of
wrong-doing in a child can ever free a parent from the divine necessity
of doing all he can to deliver his child; the bond between them cannot
be broken. It is the vulgar, slavish, worldly idea of freedom, that it
consists in being bound to nothing. Not such is God's idea of liberty!
To speak as a man--the more of vital obligation he lays on himself, the
more children he creates, with the more claims upon him, the freer is
he as creator and giver of life, which is the essence of his Godhead:
to make scope for his essence is to be free. Our Lord teaches us that
the truth, known by obedience to him, will make us free: our freedom
lies in living the truth of our relations to God and man. For a man to
be alone in the universe would be to be a slave to unspeakable longings
and lonelinesses. And again to speak after the manner of men: God could
not be satisfied with himself without doing all that a God and Father
could do for the creatures he had made--that is, without doing just
what he has done, what he is doing, what he will do, to deliver his
sons and daughters, and bring them home with rejoicing. To answer the
cry of the human heart, 'Would that I could see him! would that I might
come before him, and look upon him face to face!' he sent his son, the
express image of his person. And again, that we might not be limited in
our understanding of God by the constant presence to our weak and
dullable spiritual sense of any embodiment whatever, he took him away.
Having seen him, in his absence we understand him better. That we might
know him he came; that we might go to him he went. If we dare, like
Job, to plead with him in any of the heart-eating troubles that arise
from the impossibility of loving such misrepresentation of him as is
held out to us to love by our would-be teachers; if we think and speak
out before him that which seems to us to be right, will he not be
heartily pleased with his children's love of righteousness--with the
truth that will not part him and his righteousness? Verily he will not
plead against us with his great power, but will put strength in us, and
where we are wrong will instruct us. For the heart that wants to do and
think aright, the heart that seeks to worship him as no tyrant, but as
the perfectly, absolutely righteous God, is the delight of the Father.
To the heart that will not call that righteousness which it feels to be
unjust, but clings to the skirt of his garment, and lifts pleading eyes
to his countenance--to that heart he will lay open the riches of his
being--riches which it has not entered that heart to conceive. 'O Lord,
they tell me I have so offended against thy law that, as I am, thou
canst not look upon me, but threatenest me with eternal banishment from
thy presence. But if thou look not upon me, how can I ever be other
than I am? Lord, remember I was born in sin: how then can I see sin as
thou seest it? Remember, Lord, that I have never known myself clean:
how can I cleanse myself? Thou must needs take me as I am and cleanse
me. Is it not impossible that I should behold the final goodness of
good, the final evilness of evil? how then can I deserve eternal
torment? Had I known good and evil, seeing them as thou seest them,
then chosen the evil, and turned away from the good, I know not what I
should not deserve; but thou knowest it has ever been something good in
the evil that has enticed my selfish heart--nor mine only, but that of
all my kind. Thou requirest of us to forgive: surely thou forgivest
freely! Bound thou mayest be to destroy evil, but art thou bound to
keep the sinner alive that thou mayest punish him, even if it make him
no better? Sin cannot be deep as life, for thou art the life; and
sorrow and pain go deeper than sin, for they reach to the divine in us:
thou canst suffer, though thou wilt not sin. To see men suffer might
make us shun evil, but it never could make us hate it. We might see
thereby that thou hatest sin, but we never could see that thou lovest
the sinner. Chastise us, we pray thee, in loving kindness, and we shall
not faint. We have done much that is evil, yea, evil is very deep in
us, but we are not all evil, for we love righteousness; and art not
thou thyself, in thy Son, the sacrifice for our sins, the atonement of
out breach? Thou hast made us subject to vanity, but hast thyself taken
thy godlike share of the consequences. Could we ever have come to know
good as thou knowest it, save by passing through the sea of sin and the
fire of cleansing? They tell me I must say _for Christ's sake_, or thou
wilt not pardon: it takes the very heart out of my poor love to hear
that thou wilt not pardon me except because Christ has loved me; but I
give thee thanks that nowhere in the record of thy gospel, does one of
thy servants say any such word. In spite of all our fears and
grovelling, our weakness, and our wrongs, thou wilt be to us what thou
art--such a perfect Father as no most loving child-heart on earth could
invent the thought of! Thou wilt take our sins on thyself, giving us
thy life to live withal. Thou bearest our griefs and carriest our
sorrows; and surely thou wilt one day enable us to pay every debt we
owe to each other! Thou wilt be to us a right generous, abundant
father! Then truly our hearts shall be jubilant, because thou art what
thou art--infinitely beyond all we could imagine. Thou wilt humble and
raise us up. Thou hast given thyself to us that, having thee, we may be
eternally alive with thy life. We run within the circle of what men
call thy wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the zone of thy love!'

But be it well understood that when I say _rights_, I do not mean
_merits_--of any sort. We can deserve from him nothing at all, in the
sense of any right proceeding from ourselves. All our rights are such
as the bounty of love inconceivable has glorified our being with--
bestowed for the one only purpose of giving the satisfaction, the
fulfilment of the same--rights so deep, so high, so delicate, that
their satisfaction cannot be given until we desire it--yea long for it
with our deepest desire. The giver of them came to men, lived with men,
and died by the hands of men, that they might possess these rights
abundantly: more not God could do to fulfil his part--save indeed what
he is doing still every hour, every moment, for every individual. Our
rights are rights with God himself at the heart of them. He could
recall them if he pleased, but only by recalling us, by making us
cease. While we exist, by the being that is ours, they are ours. If he
could not fulfil our rights to us--because we would not have them, that
is--if he could not make us such as to care for these rights which he
has given us out of the very depth of his creative being, I think he
would have to uncreate us. But as to deserving, that is absurd: he had
to die in the endeavour to make us listen and receive. 'When ye shall
have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are
unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.'
Duty is a thing prepaid: it can never have desert. There is no claim on
God that springs from us: all is from him.

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