10.01 From man to God
I. FROM MAN TO GOD THESE two parables are closely akin.
They make the same comparison and contrast between what we expect of human nature even in unworthy types and what we may expect of God. They draw the same inference that God in His goodness will not come short of that expectation which we have of our fellowmen even in their unworthiness. They enforce this same lesson that in order to make sure of God’s answers our prayers must be intense and persistent.
Consider that comparison and contrast and the inference which is drawn from it. As in the parable of the unjust steward, our Lord chooses the example not of the best but of the most ordinary, indeed unworthy, men to emphasize His argument.
He illustrates the point of His own saying, “If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give good things to them that ask Him.” Here He takes certain men “being evil,” the churlish friend and the unjust judge, shows the conduct of which under certain circumstances they are capable, and asks whether under similar circumstances God Himself, the Loving and the Righteous, will not prove to be at least as generous and just. In this, we might almost say surprising, way, our Lord gives His sanction to the belief that we can learn of God from what we know of man; that at least the moral attributes of love, justice, mercy, sympathy in God are not different from, but only infinitely transcend, what we know these attributes to be in man. In the education of Israel the inspired prophets had indeed rebuked men for transferring their own ignorant and partial thoughts to God. They had held up to scorn the false gods clothed with the qualities of ordinary human nature. They insisted that God’s ways and thoughts are not as the thoughts and ways of man; for they far transcended the compass of man’s mind and imagination. But these very champions of God’s transcendence never hesitated to represent Him as having towards His people the feelings of love, of jealous care, of righteous indignation, which a father has towards his children or a husband towards his wife, or a judge towards the wrongdoer. Even in the pagan deification of the qualities which men most admired in their own fellows, still more in some of the deeper thoughts of the religions of India, we can see the instinct of man’s spirit which believes that the Divine Being has at least that affinity with man which makes intercourse between them possible. Philosophy insists that the mind of which the universe is the expression cannot be less rational in its methods than the mind of man. Religious thought at its highest point insists that if Love is the noblest quality of man there must be in God a Love not less but infinitely more noble and true. Indeed, if the evolution of the universe reaches its highest stage in man, there would be an arrest, an inexplicable failure, in the upward movement unless “in completed man began anew a tendency to God” unless manhood at its highest could rise to God and find itself fulfilled there. Thus the Incarnation, though, as we say, “miraculous” in the method of its coming, is no mere isolated marvel. It is God’s supreme vindication of man’s inevitable instinct of expectation that man can hold communion with God, because there is that in God which is in common with man. The Incarnation, indeed, lifts the thought to a higher and truer standpoint: so that it does not rise from man to God so much as descend from God to man. In the light of that revelation the higher attributes of man are seen to be the reflections in him of the Perfection of God; they are the tokens not only of manhood in God but rather of Godhead in man. But such thoughts carry us far beyond the purposes of these simple papers. And after all, the teaching of Jesus here, as always, is practical not speculative. His object is simply to impress upon men the conviction that the kindness and justice which they expect of their fellows, even the least worthy, they may with infinitely greater confidence expect of their Father in Heaven. It is perhaps worth while to pause here to notice at least two ways one of presumption, the other of distrust in which we are very apt to neglect this truth.
TAGS: [Parables]