02 - Chapter 02

’DIFFERENT CONCEPTIONS OF GOD IN THE BIBLE;

WE should all say that the main value of the Bible is that it inspires us with a sense of God’s presence with us. That sense of God constitutes the essence of religion. All who are aware of Him have some sort of religion. But if we want to know further what sort of religion it is, we must ask what sort of idea, what sort of conception of God, is associated with the sense of His presence. While the sense of God constitutes the essence of religion, the conception of God conditions its quality. It is important, therefore, not only to feel strongly and deeply that God is with you you may have that and be a Sultan ordering the massacre of Armenians, or a Saul of Tarsus persecuting Christians as a service to God. You must also have the loftiest possible conception of God, of the character of God. Let us lay it down as an axiom of our Christian life that no lower idea of God will do than the highest we have known. The moment you lower your idea of God you lower the whole standard of life. God must be to us the impersonation of our ideal sanctities. Allow nothing which you feel to be in the least wrong to mix itself with your conception of God. This I take to be an essential qualification of a Sunday-school teacher that he will on no account allow himself or his scholars to think of God except as infinitely righteous and loving. I think we shall all agree in saying that we recognise this conception of God as the Christian revelation. You will find it, therefore, in the Bible. It constitutes the eternal value of the Bible. It is the clearness, the fulness, the richness, the certainty of that idea of God in the Bible which lifts this literature into its place of supremacy in the literature of the world. But it is necessary to remember that, though this conception of God is to be found in the Bible, many other conceptions of God are there too. We shall find conceptions very inconsistent with the Christian idea of God. We shall find God thought of in a way we cannot think of Him; and doing things which, if we have the Christian idea, we cannot believe He did; and saying things we cannot believe He said. It is necessary to distinguish between the different conceptions of God, and to fix their relative values. To regard the Bible as the Word of God in the sense that you can open it anywhere, and be sure to find His word for your own life, leads to endless error and confusion. That is the weakness of any pledge to read some portion of the Bible every day. The idea is, that in any portion you get God’s word, which is not true. In many parts you will find ascribed to God actions and words which utterly contradict Jesus Christ. To believe them would be to disbelieve Him, and to twist your own moral sense too. The whole Bible can never be the rule of faith and practice. To practise Leviticus you would have to turn your chapels into slaughter-houses, and put the New Testament in the fire. How could you practise Deuteronomy, which confines worship to one place? When people use these phrases they simply do not think what they mean. It is no doubt a generous habit to speak of a whole literature in the terms of its highest content. There is a profound truth at the back of this. When you discover a man’s ideal it is profoundly true to say, ’ That’s the man ’ it is the essence of the man, it is what he is aiming at, and, at his depths, what he is aiming at he is. Still it would be dangerous therefore to take that man as infallible, and to believe all that he does is right and all he says is true. It is just as necessary, for a true estimate, to see where he fails of his ideal as to see what the ideal is. Now, to take the Christian idea of God and say, ’ That’s the Bible,’ is true only in that way. It is the consummation of the Bible; it is what the whole thing led up to; and it is therefore the deepest truth and meaning of the whole development. But we must not therefore think that all in the teaching that preceded it is infallible that is simply to confuse our own moral sense, and to obscure the ideal itself. What I want, therefore, to impress upon teachers is that, in teaching thoughts of God from the Bible, they should always hold the highest conception of God which they have formed by the help of Jesus, and all the good, as the key to the right or wrong of any other conception presented to them. Sacrifice at once any notion you may have of an infallible book, or of the inspiration of any old law-giver, or seer, or prophet, or writer, rather than lower your conception of God. Our theology is of the utmost importance. Do not allow yourselves, if you are revolting from old beliefs, to say that beliefs are of no importance, that conduct is everything. What a man really believes about God (not necessarily what he formally believes) is the foundation of his life. Approach the Bible, then, I ask you, to teach about God with the idea firmly fixed in your mind that God is the impersonation of the very highest and best you have yet conceived, and infinitely transcends that. Wherever, then, in the Bible you come upon a conception of God lower than this, do not hesitate to point out that it is lower, and to ascribe it to the special condition of the individual who wrote it, or to the stage of culture and development at which the people were who conceived it; and if they ascribed it to a revelation from God Himself, do not hesitate to say that they were mistaken. Your scholars will lose nothing by thinking that the Bible is imperfect, or the old prophet imperfect, but their souls are damaged if they think God imperfect. If e.g., you read in Numbers 25:16-18, ’ The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Vex the Midianites and smite them, for they vex you with their wiles,’ never allow the children to think that God said so.

Point out to them the difference between that morality and the ( morality of Jesus: * Pray for those who persecute you;’ ’ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ If you read in Exodus 3:22 directions ascribed to God as to how the Israelites are to steal the property of the Egyptians by pretending to borrow it, take care you do not allow the children ever to think that God gave such directions.

If you read in 1 Kings 22:20-23 that God put a lying spirit into the mouths of prophets in order to entice a man into wrong-doing, take care you do not tolerate that conception of God. There is no difficulty in setting aside these views of God if we remember that the Bible is the history of growing thought and life covering many centuries of time. I now want to illustrate the use of the Bible which I am recommending to you.

Last week I spoke of a document in the Hexateuch, which also continues into the historical books, known as J. This represents the Jahwist school during a considerable period of time. It is regarded now as the oldest of the documents. It incorporates, however, bits of literature older than itself, some snatches of old song, e.g. Behind it lie the tales and the folk-lore, and old national traditions which always precede the writing age in any nation. J., as we have it, is interwoven with some other documents, and was itself, no doubt, revised and edited both before and after its combination. This means for experts a great deal of minute work, which we cannot be expected to master. But the main features of this old document have been set before us unmistakably. The only feature I want to notice now is its conception of God. The theology of the Jahwist is very childish and elementary, though it is not all on the same level. He thinks of God very much as in human form, holding intercourse with men almost as one of themselves. His document begins with Genesis 2:4 b, and its first portion continues, without break, to the end of chapter 4. This portion contains the story of Eden. Here Jahweh moulds dust into human form and breathes into it; plants a garden and puts the man in it. Jahweh comes to the man in his sleep and takes part of his body to make a woman, and so skilfully, apparently, that the man never wakes under the operation. Jahweh walks in the garden like a man in the cool of the day. He even makes coats for Adam and Eve. Farther on the Jahwist has a flood story, in which Jahweh repents that he had made man, and decides to drown him, saving only one family. When all is over, and Noah sacrifices on his new altar, Jahweh smells a sweet savour, just as a hungry man smells welcome food. When men build the Tower of Babel, Jahweh comes down to see it he cannot see it from where he is. In Gen. xviii. the Jahwist tells a story of three men coming to Abraham’s tent. Abraham gives them water to wash their feet, and bread to eat, and Sarah makes cakes for them, and ’ they did eat ’; altogether they seemed to have had a nice time. As the story goes on, he leaves you to infer that one of these was Jahweh himself. It is J. who describes the story of Jacob wrestling with some mysterious person who, by inference, is Jahweh, He tells a very strange story in Exodus 4:24, that when Moses was returning into Egypt, at Jahweh’s own request, Jahweh met him at a lodging-place, and sought to kill him. In Exodus 14:15 it is said Jahweh took the wheels off the chariots of the Egyptians. If we wanted to believe that such statements were true at all we should resort to the device of saying they were figurative. But J. meant them literally. The Jahwist would have no difficulty in thinking of God in this way. The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah belongs to this same document, in which you remember Jahweh says, 4 1 will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know ’ (Genesis 18:21). That God was omniscient and omnipresent had never occurred to the Jahwist. Jahweh, like a man, had to go and see if he wanted to know. There is, however, some compensation in the fact that he can move about without difficulty he can come down and go up. One might say, perhaps, that in J., though Jahweh cannot be everywhere, he can go to almost any place. All this is just like a child’s thought. The child, at Christmas, can believe that, though Santa Glaus cannot be everywhere, he can move about with wonderful facility, and though he is a man he is rather mysterious. The Jahwist’s thought of God represents the childhood stage of the national life. This document itself, however, shows some advance upon this level of thought. When Jahweh comes to Moses in the burning bush, the ground is holy, and Moses must not draw too near. Jahweh is not so familiar and accessible as in the other instances I referred to. This represents later thought of the Jahwist school, but it is the same school, and even in this very story Jahweh has to ’ come down ’ to deliver the people from Egypt. Again, in this document men worship Jahweh from the beginning. Knowledge of Jahweh is not limited to the chosen people. ’ Nimrod was a mighty hunter before Jahweh;’ Laban asks Jahweh’s blessing on Abraham’s servant; Balaam has to do with Jahweh; Jahweh worship is looked upon as the primitive religion of man. Nevertheless, Abraham is definitely called, and one line of his descendants are the chosen people to whom Jahweh promises the land, and for whom he will drive out other nations. It is in this chosen nation and all its history that the Jahwist is intensely interested. Jahweh here becomes the God of this people, just as other peoples had gods of their own. The moral character of Jahweh is by no means high. Moses is represented on a higher elevation more than once, if judged by our modern standard e.g., Jahweh threatens to kill the people for disobedience, and Moses pleads for them, and he succeeds in persuading Jahweh when he reminds him that his fame will suffer; the Egyptians will hear of his killing the people he delivered, and will say he was not able to bring them into the land! To this argument Jahweh gives way. Without further illustration, we can surely see that here, throughout an entire document, is a conception of God which the growth of mind has transcended. There is truth in it, as in every stage of culture, but it is a stage, and a stage left behind. We turn now to the conception of God in the Elohist. This document is called the Elohist because its name for God is Elohim, not Jahweh, up to the time when Jahweh revealed himself as such to Moses. Here, at once, is a great difference between the Elohist and the Jahwist. To the latter even the ancestors of Abraham had worshipped Jahweh. But in the Elohist document Joshua says to all the people of Israel (Joshua 24:2), ’Thus saith Jahweh, the God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt of old time beyond the River, and served other gods.’ The two documents fundamentally contradict each other on this point. To the Jahwist, Jahweh worship was from the beginning; to the Elohist it was a new revelation to Moses. Jahweh was the God who called Abraham, but Abraham did not know him as such. The Elohist has got the idea of progressive revelation. To him it was possible to know more of God, to discover a new name, a new character, as time went on. It is exceedingly interesting to find this so far back; it comes almost as a rebuke to many who have scarcely grasped the idea of progressive revelation yet. And the Elohist’s way of thinking of God is very different from the Jahwist’s. We are dealing here with more mature mental conception. He is more reflective; he has left the child stage. And so the familiarity with which the Jahwist spoke of God disappears, God does not come among men almost like one of themselves; he is more distant and awful. He comes mostly in vision and in dream. His voice is often heard when no form is mentioned, and sometimes his angel speaks for him. With E. intermediaries are beginning, and God is being distanced from man.

God does still speak with Moses face to face and mouth to mouth, but with no one else so. The people when they have heard God at Sinai even beg that he will speak to them no more, but let Moses mediate God dwells in the thick darkness. This conception of God is no doubt less crude and simple than the Jahwist’s, and represents later thought. It is in this document that God is so often said to ’ prove ’ men. The story of Abraham and Isaac on Moriah belongs to the Elohist, and is perhaps the outstanding instance of this point. I should like briefly to illustrate how this story might be taken in a Sunday-school class. As too often taught it presents a very barbarous view of God. That God should even for a moment of trial ask a man to kill his own child is a horrible thought. I wish no Sunday-school walls would show a picture of Abraham, with his uplifted knife, ready to kill his son. Such a picture tends to degrade our thought of God and man. It is not many years since a man in Massachusetts was tried for the murder of his child, and he declared it was a religious act, that through reading the story of Abraham and Isaac he became convinced that God wanted his child. I remember, when a boy, hearing a preacher tell the story of a father who had been brought to love God through losing a favourite child. The man and the preacher believed that God wanted for Himself the love which was bestowed on the child, and that He took the child away in order to get it. These are relics of paganism which cling to the Christian world. They are often supported by wrong views of Bible stories, such as the story of Abraham and Isaac. We have seen already that words are often attributed to God, which we must not consider His which we cannot if we believe in Christianity. The story of Abraham and Isaac belongs to the class of aetiological myths known in every nation i.e., myths which arise as acceptable accounts of the causes of things, of some custom or institution. The Greeks, e.g., found that they had dropped the custom of human sacrifices, and substituted the sacrifices of animals. To account for that there arose the mythical story of the goddess Artemis, demanding the life of Agamemnon’s daughter, and then saving her at the last moment and providing a stag for sacrifice in her stead. The Hebrews, too, found they had left off sacrificing children and were sacrificing animals instead. And it is this tradition that is thrown into the form of a tale in the story of Mount Moriah, and Moveh, significantly enough, means * place of instruction.’ The sacrifice of children to the gods was a common heathen practice. It was not unknown in Israel. The story of Jephthah and his daughter reminds us of it (Judges 11:29-40). Mark this: it is said that the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he vowed, if successful in war, to offer unto the Lord as a burnt- offering whatsoever came forth of the doors of his house to meet him when he returned, and when he found to his sorrow that his own daughter was the victim, he could not go back. Jephthah and his daughter thought it right she should be sacrificed. Ahaz the King passed his son through the fire; so did Manasseh. Jeremiah says they had even built special places in order to do this, and he protested that God had never commanded it (Jeremiah 7:31; Jeremiah 19:5; Jeremiah 32:35).

You can use the story in class to show how people have gradually been instructed in the way of serving God, how they grew to know it was wrong to kill their children. You might then show how a still higher point of view is given in the words of Micah that God wants neither the firstborn, nor rams, nor rivers of oil, but requires only that we should ’ do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before God.’ You could show how that revelation of the prophets rose to its purer heights in Jesus Christ. ’ Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ The use of such tales is not to teach us what the will of God is for us now, but to show us how God has led men up through darkness to larger light, how revelation is an ever unfolding process, how in their thought of God men have ascended by a rugged road, by a path marked with blood, to the knowledge of God in Christ, where the real sacrifice is a heart loyal to God and a life in harmony with His will. Then you can turn the story round, and show in what sense God does ask from us the lives of our children; how we must do our best to give them to God by consecrating them to high ideals of life; teach them that it is better for them to suffer than to be dishonourable; better to be poor and unsuccessful than get on in the world by dishonest means; that sometimes in order to be true to conscience and to God they must be willing to climb the sacrificial mount and submit to pain and suffering. All these and many more beautiful lessons can be drawn from the old story. I have spent a little time over it because teachers sometimes say, ’ We cannot teach in the old way, and do not know what to teach.’ There is plenty to teach, and far more in the Bible in the new light than in the old. The Elohist apparently regarded human sacrifices as a temporary way of * proving ’ men. They were indeed a proof that man belonged to God, and that all he had was God’s, but they proved also that he very much needed a better knowledge of God’s character and will. The Elohist’s conception of God’s moral character is also very different from ours to-day. In the so-called ’ Book of the Covenant’ (Exodus 21:1-36; Exodus 22:1-31; Exodus 23:1-33) there are certainly many admirable moral precepts, and the Decalogue, though not in its present expanded form, is in this document. Yet we must not expect to find in the Elohist’s God a satisfactory moral character for our God to-day. The Elohist, e.g., does not condemn polygamy God’s favourites may have many wives, and no one thinks it wrong, any more than the Chinese think it wrong for their Emperors. In war the Elohist’s God would approve things which, if done now, would be denounced as barbarous. The utter destruction of men, women, and children, and cattle by Joshua in Jericho, the hewing of Agag by Samuel, the barbarities which David executed on the Amalekites, are all done by the command of God. What has happened in our country recently? The way in which these Old Testament commands to fight have been quoted even in some pulpits to justify war shows how tremendously important it is to take the historical view of these matters.

There is no atrocity which you cannot justify if you proceed by the other method. The Elohist’s God would never be a party to the Geneva Convention. To read these old commands as commands for us is simply to reverse twenty-five centuries of progress and put us back in a semibarbarous age, and it is certainly to make the Cross of Christ of none effect. In the Elohist’s legislation no sorceress must be suffered to live. That was why 100,000 witches were burned in Germany in one century after the Reformation. The appeal to the Bible produced that result. The Elohist puts to death, utterly destroys, the man who worships any god other than Jahweh. It is easy to see that the Spanish Inquisition is nearer to that point of view than it is to the Christ. For practical life, the historical interpretation of the Bible is of immense importance. We must learn that such views of God as we have been considering, though they are in the Bible, are not to be our views. In very early times, when the Israelites were living a wandering, half-civilized life, it would have been difficult to see in them any superiority over the other tribes about them. Their religion was, of course, poor, like their life. Stocks and stones had taken the same place in their worship as in that of the others. They had also seen the sky with its wonders, and connected with its powers there were gods, they thought. Probably when Jahweh first became the national god he was the god of rain and thunderstorms.

There are traces of this at a comparatively late time. The Syrians are defeated by Israel in battle, and they say ’ their god is the god of the hills.’ The reference, probably, is to the belief that Jahweh was the storm god, and the hills drew the rain from the clouds and urged the elements to battle. In the so - called Song of Deborah we read: ’ Jahweh, when thou wentest forth out of Seir, when thou marchedst out of the fields of Edom, the earth trembled, the heavens also dropped yea, the clouds dropped water. The mountains flowed down at the presence of Jahweh.’ He was still the storm god. In Psalms 18:7-15 is a description of Jahweh as a storm god. Of course, he was much more than this to the people at the time these passages were written, but they show how the old conceptions lingered on, as old conceptions do, side by side with broader ones.

Amos, in the eighth century, tells us that the Israelites had worshipped stars when they were in the wilderness. When they settled in Canaan they partook in the Canaanite worship of Baal and Ashera side by side with Jahweh, and they had household gods (teraphim) also. In Judges 8:27 we read that Gideon, the man who refused to be made King, saying, ’Jahweh shall rule over you,’ nevertheless made an ephod and worshipped it, and the people worshipped it. The man who wrote the story thought this unfaithful to Jahweh, because he was judging by a later standard; but Gideon saw nothing wrong in it. In Judg. xvii. we read of a man of Mount Ephraim whose name was Micah. This man worshipped Jahweh, but he also had a house of gods, and he made an ephod and images, and was not aware of any inconsistency. Later on the children of Dan ’ set up Micah’s graven image all the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.’ All this shows that at one time Jahweh was one of many gods; other gods were real gods. The Israelites themselves believed, for example, that Chemosh was as truly the god of the Moabites as Jahweh was theirs, and they speak of Chemosh giving territory to his people to inherit, just as Jahweh had given them territory (Judges 11:24). Some years ago a stone was discovered on which there was an inscription by a Moabite King called Mesha, written about goo B.C. This is part of the translation: ’ I am Mesha, King of Moab.... I have raised this stone to Chemosh, for he has delivered me from all my enemies, and given me vengeance upon all that hate me. Omri, King of Israel, oppressed Moab many years, for then Chemosh was angry with his land. But in my days Chemosh said, " I will look upon him and upon his house, and Israel shall fall for ever."... Chemosh took pity on the people, I laid siege to Kirjathaim, which the King of Israel had fortified, and I took the city and slew all the inhabitants in honour of Chemosh. And Chemosh said to me, " Go forth, and take the city of Nebo, from Israel." Then I went out by night, fought against the place from the dawn of the day till noon, took it, and slew all the inhabitants; and I took away all the sacred vessels of Jahweh and consecrated them to Chemosh.’ Just as a King of Israel would speak of Jahweh, the King of Moab speaks of Chemosh. His god sends him to battle. If he is defeated the god is angry; if he succeeds the god is favourable. And we have seen that there was a time when the Israelite believed Chemosh to be as real for Moab as Jahweh for himself. You find the same thing everywhere. The old Assyrian Kings said exactly the same thing of the god Assur. Assur sent them to battle, gave defeat or victory as he thought fit. The history, however, is very obscure up to the time of Samuel, and uncertain for some time after. Samuel organized a Jahweh party. David worshipped Jahweh only, though he regards it as possible to be driven out of Jahweh’s inheritance into that of other gods (1 Samuel 26:19). Solomon was not exclusively devoted to Jahweh, for he built places of worship for other deities as well. At a later time Jahweh was worshipped in the form of a calf, the Canaanite Baal was worshipped at Court and by many of the people. There was great danger lest the Jahweh religion should be absorbed in other forms. It was a wonderful providence that rescued it, and secured that out of that impure Jahweh worship, that poor idea of God, not from Moab or any other people, was developed a religion which made possible that Christianity which is God’s highest and richest revelation to the world. Providence used two weapons to secure that victory: one was social trouble, and the other a succession of prophets, such as the world has not known in any other nation. In times of oppression the national feeling and faith were kindled afresh, and threw the people back upon what was most peculiarly their own. And the prophets came. Elijah and Elisha did much to root out Baalism, though they did not object to calf- worship. With Amos, however, the new era was ushered in. The revolution of Jehu had overthrown the idolatrous house of Ahab, but unrighteousness, oppression of the poor, licentiousness and revelry, had become flagrant vices. It was in this dark night of sin that the star of the new prophecy appeared. The herdsman of Tekoa went up to the luxurious north to preach righteousness. They did not like it. Such people never do like it. They wanted to be religious without being righteous. Amos would not have it, and therefore they would not have Amos. They stopped his preaching, but they could not prevent him writing, and the writing is still in our hands. He and his successors preached a God who had a distinct moral character. Their idea of God was not pure monotheism i.e., it did not utterly exclude the existence of other gods; but there must be only one god for Israel Jahweh. Not only so, but Jahweh is supreme over all other gods. They are real, but they are subordinate. Jahweh has rivals, but no equals. There is no god like unto him. Jahweh even overrules the movements of other nations. This prophecy represents a great advance in the conception of God, not only on the governmental side, in the concept of power and supremacy, but also on the moral side, in the concept of justice and mercy. God now is in a moral relation to His people, not merely a national one. He would note not only whether they were Israelites, but whether they were good. The logical outcome of such a doctrine would be the universality and unity of God, but it took ages to work out. The prophets of the eighth century worked at the foundations, but did not see the completion of the structure. They did a noble work in the upward evolution of religion. The world needed a still higher conception of God than theirs, and their work made that higher conception possible. Jeremiah came with his wonderful conception of God writing a new covenant in the hearts of His people, making religion spiritual and free, and with his proclamation of Divine forgiveness. And in Babylon there arose some great soul, whose name we do not know, who climbed the mountain of Holy Communion to greet the greater day of God, and to become herald of the larger light for the captives of darkness the man who saw that it was a small thing for God to save one nation, and declared that Israel must become a light to lighten the Gentiles, and Israel’s God a Saviour to the ends of the earth. Here you reach the high-water mark in the Old Testament conceptions of God. I have no time to follow the theme into the New Testament; I will only say that it was in the succession of these great prophets Jesus came, and it was their truth He rescued from neglect and carried to its highest culmination at a time when the world’s greatest need was a universal religion. Expanding intellectual life iu Greece had broken the national forms of its first statements; Roman conquests had created something like political unity; the idea of universalism was broadening philosophy and extending government, and the time had come for a universal religion. And in the fulness of time came Jesus, to whom God was Father of man, as man, the relation of God to man personal, spiritual, universal, to whom the highest religion was love and service, and who bequeathed to the world the grandest of all faiths, the faith that God Himself is incarnate in humanity, working in it to will and to do His own good pleasure, and will continue to work ’ till we all come, in the fulness of faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, to a full-grown man, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.’