I. how to think about God - Chambers, Oswald

Lord, shew us the father, and it sufficeth us

. . . . He that hath seen me hath seen the father; and how sayest thou then, shew us the father? John 14:89

How do we think about god habitually? Jesus said, he that hath seen me hath seen the father. In the face, in the character, in the walk and the work of Jesus, we have god the father revealed. The christian faith affirms the existence of a personal god who reveals himself. Pseudo-christianity departs from this, we are told we cannot know anything at all about god, we do not know whether he is a personal being, we cannot know whether he is good. The christian revelation is that god is a personal being and he is good. By good, i mean morally good. Test all beliefs about god by that; do they reveal clearly that god is a good god, and that all that is moral and pure and true and upright comes from god?

1. Instinct and revelation

For as i passed by, and beheld your devotions, i found an altar with this inscription, to the unknown god. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare i unto you. (acts 17:23)

The evangelical teaching about this intuition and instinct in human nature is that it is to be recognised as being there, but requiring a revelation from outside to discover to it what it wants. The christian affir- mation is that this instinct and intuition is not god, but a dumb, inarticulate feeling after god. That they should seek god, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he is not far from each one of us (acts 17:27 RV). That is the first point of divergence of the modern tendency from the christian affirmation. We see at once how it works out in practical religious life; it means that we have the spirit of god in us by nature, we do not need to be born again of the spirit. This line of thinking could not be more diametrically opposed to the new testament conception. The new testament reveals that the deepest instinct in us is to feel after god, but that instinct is never to be taken for the spirit of god. Honeycombing all our christian teaching to-day is the idea that the instinct in us is god and that as we allow the deepest instinct in us expression, we reveal ourselves as more or less god, and that the being in whom this instinct had its greatest expression was the lord Jesus Christ; therefore he stands in the modern movements and to everyone who follows that line of thinking, as the best expression of god. The new tes- tament reasoning is that if we are going to enter into contact with the god whom the bible reveals we must be born from above, be lifted into a totally new realm by means of the atonement. Marvel not that i said unto thee, ye must be born again ( john 3:7). Jesus Christ is a distinct break in our order and not the product of our order. Just as our lord came into human history from the outside, so he must come into us from the outside. The meaning of new birth is that we know god in a vital relationship (see john 1:1213). Paul puts as the christian attitude to god that we are the offspring of god. The term the father- hood of god is rarely used nowadays in the new testament sense, it is only used in the sense of god as creator, not in the sense that Jesus Christ used it; the consequence is great havoc is produced in our lords teaching. If god is our father by creation in the sense Jesus says he is by the experience of regeneration, then the atonement is nonsense. What was the good of Jesus Christ living and dying and rising again? Where is the need for all this teaching that we have to be born again? If our instinct is god, we need only be sufficiently well-educated to allow the instinct which is in us to come out. But does this satisfy you and me regarding ourselves? Are we consciously, solemnly and satisfyingly confident that if we let the deepest instinct in us have expression, we are letting god express himself ? According to the bible, the very essence of Satan is self-rule, and there are two mighty forces at work, one against and one for god. Paul argues, who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so the things of god none knoweth, save the spirit of god (1 Corinthians 2:11 rv). It is the same insistence on the need to be born from above, and if any man will take Jesus Christs way and face facts as he asks us to face them, he will find all the mystery of doing right amid entrancing wrong, all the mystery of attaining the highest when the lowest is the most attractive, all the mystery of complete deliverance from the disposition of sin, opened up and made possible. Doctrine is expounded not by our intelligence, not by our searching, but by the indwelling of a completely new spirit imparted to us by the lord Jesus Christ.

It is necessary to give a note of warning against the tyranny of abstractions. An ideal has no power over us until it becomes incarnate. The idea of beauty lies unawakened until we see a thing we call beautiful. God may be a mere mental abstraction; he may be spoken of in terms of culture or poetry or philosophy, but he has not the slightest meaning for us until he becomes incarnate. When once we know that god has trod this earth with naked feet, and woven with human hands the creed of creeds, then we are arrested. When once we know that the almighty being who reigns and rules over his creation does not do so in calm disdain, but puts his back to the wall of the world, so to speak, and receives all the downcast, the outcast, the sin-defiled, the wrong, the wicked and the sinful into his arms, then we are arrested. An intellectual conception of god may be found in a bad vicious character. The knowledge and vision of god is dependent entirely on a pure heart. Character determines the rev- elation of god to the individual. The pure in heart see god. Jesus Christ changes the worst into the best and gives the moral readjustment that enables a man to love and delight in the true god. Of a great almighty incomprehensible being we know nothing, but of our Lord Jesus Christ we do know, and the new testament reveals that the almighty god is nothing that Jesus was not.

2. Ideas and revelation

For in him we live, and move, and have our being. . . . Being then the offspring of god . . . (acts 17:282 RV)

Our ideas of god are no greater than ourselves, and we ought to receive from god other ideas by revelation, so that the working mind of man may receive the power to live a larger, grander life than lies in any of his own ideas. Our ideas of god are indistinct, and when we make those ideas in their indistinctness the ground of our understanding of god, we are hope- lessly at sea. We are never told to walk in the light of our convictions or instinctive ideas; according to the bible, we have to walk in the light of our lord. Nothing is known about god saving in and through our lord Jesus Christ. Neither doth any know the father, save the son, and he to whomsoever the son willeth to reveal him (Matthew 11:27 RV). I can only have a personal, passionate love for a being who is not myself, and the whole meaning of the atonement is to destroy the idolatry of self-love, to extract the pernicious poi- son of self-interest, and presence us with the divinity which enables us to love god with all our heart, and soul, and mind, and strength. The new testament reveals that we are not ultimately to be absorbed into god; we are distinctly and eternally to be the pas- sionate lovers of god. No man was ever created to be his own god, and no man was ever created to be the god of another man, and no system of ideas was ever made to dominate man as god. There is one god, and that god was incarnate in the lord Jesus Christ. And as that marvellous being has his dominant sway over us, the whole of time, the whole of eternity, and the threshold between the two, will be shot through with the dawn of an endless day that shall never end in night. When god shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and heaven prove the complement of earth