03 - Chapter 03
III. FAITH IN GOD AT THE ROOT OF JEWISH HOPES AND EXPECTATIONS. Where is thy zeal and thy strength,... are they restrained? (Isaiah 63:15).
Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down (Isaiah 64:1). THE same facts often make different impressions upon, or suggest different inferences to, different people.
One man looking over the pages of history sees nothing therein but isolated events of more or less interest and importance, while to another they contain a record of God’s way with man. One man, as he scans the face of nature, sees nothing but particles of matter and thinks of nothing but blind force and mechanical laws, but another sees God everywhere and looks upon nature as God clothed in material dress that thus He may appeal through our senses to our souls. And it was even so with the people of old. When they looked at nature and at human life, some saw things which others did not see and realised the meaning and significance of things on which others put little or no stress. What we may call the prior spiritual convictions of men were different, and so they interpreted what was before them in different ways.
Take, for example, the attitude of men and women towards the sterner and more sorrowful facts of life.
Those who were unspiritual and unbelieving were confirmed in their unbelief by what they saw. How can there be a righteous God, they asked, when the inequalities of life are so great and when there is so much sin and sorrow in the world? How can a righteous God bear so long with the sins of wicked men? How can a just God permit so many and so great inequalities and injustices to exist in human life? And so they said there is no God, and if there be He has forsaken the earth and cares not at all for us miserable men. But the prior spiritual convictions of pious and enlightened Jews would never, for more than a moment, tolerate such inferences and conclusions from even the saddest of facts. To them God, though invisible to the bodily eye, was yet the most real and powerful fact in all the universe of being, and the sternest and most perplexing experiences in life were not able to make them give up their faith in God. There might be, there were, things in human life which perplexed them, and which they could not reconcile with the existence of God: but God, they felt sure, was on His throne over-ruling all things, and they were convinced that He would yet make light to arise in the darkness, so that men might clearly see Him energising wonderfully, and causing all things to work together for good to them that loved Him. The Israelites had been long in Egypt, and we may be quite certain that in many ways they owed much to a people who for hundreds, if not for thousands, of years before the exodus were far advanced in learning, in art, in civilisation. The Jews of St. Stephen’s time meant more than some of us are inclined to think when they said that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.
Nevertheless there was one all-important matter in regard to which Moses, after the example of Abraham, wished his people and himself to be clearly marked off from those among whom they dwelt. A few of the Egyptians may have been possessed of a worthy conception of God, but in the religion of the people there were gods many and idols innumerable, with customs and practices of an absurd and degrading kind; and from all these Moses naturally wished his people to be free.
Moreover, while the Egyptians believed in a future life and in a judgment after death, their belief was so darkened by baleful superstitions and doleful legends that the future, with its sombre gloom, overshadowed for them the immediate practical duties of the present. Instead of being to them an inspiration and a help, their belief in a future life was a night-mare which robbed them of their strength.
Possibly it was because Moses clearly perceived the hurtful character of the Egyptian belief in a future life that he was divinely led towards that belief which he tried to impress upon his people belief in an ever-present God, governing and guiding now, rewarding the righteous, pardoning the peni-tent, and punishing the guilty. And it may have been because Moses believed his people to be specially blessed of Him whose power and good-ness they recognised, and whose will they obeyed a divine society certain to be supported by an extraordinary Providence that in the earlier books of the Bible so little stress is laid upon the doctrine of a future life that some have been inclined to wonder whether, at first, the children of Israel were even so much as acquainted with it.
Now it is not difficult to see that when believing as Moses had taught them the children of Israel were not destitute of a reason for the faith that was in them a reason vaguely felt if not always clearly seen.
For, after all, it is man’s inhumanity to man that causes such countless thousands to mourn; and why should we blame God for the evil done by man?
There is one thing in the universe which God did not create, and that is sin, whose evil and hurtful consequences to the sinner as well as to others are more or less apparent unto all. Sin owes its origin to man, who is a Self, a Personality, endowed with the gift of freedom and self-determination, without which a moral life is impossible, and who can, and only too often does, introduce disorder, lawlessness, rebellion into the world by ignoring his true place in the universe of being, and putting his own will in the place of the will of Him who is, and ought to be recognised as, supreme. But when we overlook what evil man hath done to himself and to his brother man by his sin, and think only of our relationship to Him who is in-visible, we cannot fail to perceive the abiding good-ness of the Lord. Is not our existence a thing for which we ought to be thankful? Is it not a glorious thing that God hath prepared for us a habitation in this wonderful universe? that we are privileged to look abroad upon the marvels and beauties of earth and sky and sea, to experience the pleasurable consciousness of continued life and activity, and to know that our every blessing comes down to us from Him who causeth His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust? In the eyes of the Jews material possessions bulked very largely, and it was difficult for them to believe that a man was blessed of God if he was not successful, rich, and honoured. And was there not an element of truth at the root of such a belief?
Even in a disordered state, where unjust laws pre-vailed, were not God-fearing, conscientious, honest, thrifty, hard-working men and women as likely as any others to secure a competent portion of the good things of this life? And even in such a state, when we look long enough at human life, do we not often see good men come at last to their own, while mischief, sorrow, and disaster sooner or later follow in the train of godlessness, vice, knavery, and pro-fligacy? ’Though a sinner do evil an hundred times and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God, which fear before him; but it shall not be well with the wicked.’ ’ I have seen the wicked in great power and spread-ing himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found. Mark the perfect man and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.’
Moreover, however materialistic the Jews might be in their ideas with regard to prosperity it did not require a very pious Jew to see that material blessings were not the only good things of which a man could be possessed. Were not they who trusted in the Lord and who strove at all costs to do what they believed to be His will, possessed, as a rule, of an inward satisfaction, a peace of mind, a strength, a hope, a confidence which were altogether wanting in the case of those who were unbelieving, faithless, sinful? And was there not a restlessness, a dissatis-faction with self, a wretchedness, a misery in the hearts and lives of the godless, the unbelieving, the careless, the sinful, which even the greatest material prosperity was not able to remove or undo?
’ Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly... but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night.’ ’ Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart.’ At the same time we must carefully remember that the question as to the inequalities and injustices in human life did not come before the minds of the children of Israel in the way in which it presents itself to us. For with the Israelites the great thing was not the individual, but the family, the tribe, and, above all, the nation in which all property and power were centred and which assigned to the individual the status, the power, the authority which he possessed. And so in their eyes there was nothing very irrational in the idea that God should punish the community for the sake of the individual, or that the father’s virtues and vices should be visited on the children or the children’s children.
They did not, therefore, when they attempted to justify the way of God with man, feel any great need of the doctrine of a future life, more especially as that life was for long only too often thought of as a life of inactivity, dulness, death the continued existence of pithless shades in a land of powerless-ness and forgetful ness.
Even towards the close of the kingdom of Judah, when, in order to undo the evils of a fatalism that was paralysing the efforts of the people and driving them to despair, the Prophets had to assert the worth and emphasise the responsibility of the indi-vidual, they did not summon to their aid the doctrine of a future life, for they still believed in the old doctrine which asserted that, all things con-sidered, the individual’s experiences were in keeping with his deserts. But owing to the circumstances in which they found themselves they had to restate the doctrine, calling attention to and strongly emphasising the sin fulness of those who suffer the iniquity of those who are afflicted of the Lord. ’ In those days,’ says Jeremiah, ’ they shall say no more the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grapes his teeth shall be set on edge.’ ’ The soul that sinneth,’ says Ezekiel, ’ it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.’
Jeremiah and Ezekiel, like Job, could not have been far away from belief in the doctrine of a future life. Nevertheless, without it, and with the aid of the old doctrine, they were able, so they were per-suaded, to solve the problem with which they had to deal. And we are the less inclined to wonder at this conviction of theirs when we remember that to them the fate of the individual was overshadowed by the consciousness of the living presence of a God who concerned Himself, more especially, with the welfare and wellbeing of the people as a whole. With them, as with the great majority of the Jewish people in the days of old, the thought of a God-fearing society upon the earth, a perfect kingdom supported by an extraordinary providence, was the thought which above all others possessed their minds. With them, therefore, the great question was, Will God’s own kingdom yet be established on the earth in all its glory and in all its completeness? Will God’s own peculiar people yet be exalted and honoured among the nations? And will all nations yet be constrained to confess that Jehovah is in very truth the only living and true God? The Prophets as they succeeded each other were inspired by hope as they looked forward to the future, for they saw their own nation chastened, transformed, exalted, and they pictured the advent of an age when Israel, freed from foreign oppressions and purified from ungodly members, would realise its ideal character and live an idyllic life of righteous-ness. Yea, they had hope for other nations also, for ’ the day of the Lord,’ whose early dawn they all eagerly awaited, was a day when the power and glory of the Lord would be fully manifested before all men, and when the nations of the world, acknow-ledging God to be the Lord, would be incorporated with or made willing subjects of a glorified Israel, or else remaining irreconcilably hostile they would be utterly destroyed by God and His people.
Without a belief of this kind, how could the Prophets of Israel have borne themselves up with heart and hope in the presence of facts that often were disappointing in the extreme? What was required, most people felt, was a signal manifesta-tion of the power of Almighty God. Proud and haughty men must be humbled, and godless and insolent nations must be made to see that they cannot continue to ignore and defy the Lord. And they were sure that this expectation of theirs would yet be realised. It must be so, for God exists and rules, and must prevail in the end. God is in His heavens, and sooner or later it would be right with their nation and with the world. And pious Jews had no doubt at all as to the truthfulness of the prophecies of their inspired Leaders and Teachers and as to the coming of that which to their mind was inevitable. One of the most remarkable things in Jewish history is this, that the star of hope never ceased to be visible to many, however dark and clouded the sky of their national life might seem to be. Hope sprang eternal in the Jewish breast. Even in the time of direst calamity and deepest humiliation the sure vision of her best and ablest men foresaw and fore-told a time of deliverance and victory and greatness when He would come who would be mighty to save, who would restore the kingdom to Israel and reign in righteousness over the whole world. But the pious Jews were perplexed by the delay in the coming of that time. Why did God permit the world to go on as it was? Why did He not at once interfere and deliver the world from sin and sorrow? Why did the great Deliverer delay His coming? Why did He not rend the heavens and come down and banish sin and sorrow and misery and oppression for ever from the earth? ’ Where is thy zeal and thy strength ’ they cried to God ’ are they restrained? ’ ’ O that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down! ’ Who could have anticipated the strange and un-natural use which some have made of the hopes and expectations of the Jews? Who could have pre-dicted that they would be used as an argument against the divine origin of Christianity? And yet so it has been. The wish was father to the alleged fact, some have said. Men invented what they were always expecting. And so we are re-minded that this tendency among people in former days to believe that a certain event was likely to happen is for us an argument against the belief that it has actually taken place. But such an argument can only hold good if the event expected be antecedently improbable, which in this case it is far from being.
If God be not a mere self-identical unity, but, as we have reason to believe, a self-revealing Spirit, is it not perfectly natural for Him to desire to enter into communication with the men and women He has called into being? And if He reveals Himself unto them, are we not entitled to expect that that Revelation will be made in a manner suitable to their needs and conditioned by their moral and spiritual capacity?
It is true that the form in which the hopes and expectations of the Jews were popularly expressed had led the people of Christ’s day to look for a deliverer of a kind greatly different from the one that was actually sent. But, as many people soon perceived, Christ really answered to the greatest needs, deepest longings, and noblest aspirations of the Jews, even when seeming to disappoint them. For the popular beliefs were crude representations of habitual and instinctive convictions which arose from the very depths of their being. They believed in a righteous God whose will must in the end be realised, and it was perfectly natural for them to be convinced that a life of sin is not the true and normal life for man, and that a world of increasing wickedness is not the world as God meant it to be, or as He wished it to be, or as He willed that in the future it should be. And why could not God have been in Christ fully and abidingly even although He was born of a woman and made under the law?
If God dwells anywhere on earth it is in the humble and pure heart. If God is to be seen any-where on earth it is in the life of man. And does not God work out his plans and purposes in human affairs by the instrumentality of man? We need not be surprised, therefore, when we find that the Divine Spiritual Power makes itself manifest in the Man Jesus that it is from the bosom of humanity that He is raised up who is to be a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of His people Israel. And how could one sent by God redeem a sinful nation, not to speak of a wicked world, without opposition, conflict, pain, sorrow without being, as the Prophet foretold, ’ despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief with-out being wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities without that sacrifice which the good of others demanded without that giving up of Himself for the wellbeing of others in which divine love reaches its highest expression and finds its richest, purest, most abiding blessedness? The hopes and expectations of the Jews, there-fore, were not mere illusions without any ground in reason or in the nature of things. And instead of being an argument against the truth contained in the words, ’ God sent forth his Son,’ they, in reality, lead up to and prepare us for that great event which took place in ’ the fulness of time.’