The Potter and the Clay. Arthur F. Winnington Ingram
(c) But not content with this life, He had another ready when this was over. He knew the boys wanted life, and that this life would not be enough to satisfy them, especially if they died early; so He had another ready for them. And here, again, another psalmist dashes in with his word of praise: "He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him a long life, even for ever."
This is our glorious hope to-day. It is only when we have grasped the splendour of the generosity of God that we can really appraise the meanness of man.
Nearly all the ills of our life on earth—the poverty, the class hatred, the wars—come from an unfair grasping at an unfair share of the gifts of the generous God.
"They ask no thrones; they only ask to share
The common liberty of earth and air,"
some poet sang of the gipsies.
God gave plenty of land, and plenty of water, and plenty of air, and if the New Testament motto had been followed, "Having food and raiment, with these we shall have enough," the generosity of God would have been mirrored in the generosity of man.
3. But even this marvellous power and generosity would not excite the passionate love of mankind, but for His Humility. Power may only awe; the merely generous Lord or Lady Bountiful, kind as they often are, are sometimes felt to do it in a spirit of patronage and self-pleasing; they like to be thought bountiful and kind, and have their reward in the grateful looks and even obsequious demeanour of the recipients of their bounty. But it is Christmas which really stirs the blood. That this powerful, generous Being should manifest His power and shower down His gifts was wonderful; but that He should give Himself—this was sublime! This is what stirred heaven to its depths—"Glory to God in the highest!"
The crowning splendour of God was His Humility. He was great when He said, "Let there be light, and there was light." He was mighty when He opened His Hand and filled all things living with plenteousness. But He was greatest of all when He lay as a babe in the manger. Well may the adoring Christian look up at Christmas and salute this third revelation of the splendour of God:
"Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown
When Thou camest to earth for me. …
Oh, come to my heart, Lord Jesus:
There is room in my heart for Thee!"
II. What, then, ought this belief in the splendid power, generosity, and humility of God to produce in us?
1. It must produce Praise. It must make us say: "Praise God in His holiness; praise Him in the firmament of His power."
You have caught sight of Mont Blanc and you have seen Niagara, and you say quite naturally, "How splendid!"
2. It produces Hope. War, slaughter, misery, can't be the end, if such a God exists. It may be inevitable from man's lust, ambition, and greed; but it can't be the end—if God's people work with God: there must be a kingdom coming at last in which dwelleth, not ambition, tyranny, or cruelty, but "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."
3. It produces Peace. Once believe in the splendour of God, and you get "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." "Thou wilt keep him," says the prophet, "in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee." The world is not out of God's Hand, as some people would persuade us, nor any individual in the world. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," and "ye are of more value than many sparrows."
4. And it produces answering Sacrifice and Courage. What we want to-day is "the warrior's mind," which gives and does not heed the cost, which fights and does not heed the wounds; and we can only be nerved for this by the splendid self-sacrifice of God Himself.
If man is God's child, then it must be a case of "Like Father, like son," and the splendour of God must be answered by the nobility of man. To know such a God is to live, to serve such a God is to reign; with such a faith, death loses its sting, and the grave its terrors. For to die is to pass into the presence of One who has shown Himself powerful and generous and humble. And the response of the grateful soul, with ten times the conviction of the psalmist, when he thinks of what happened on Christmas Day, will be the same words uttered so many thousand years ago:
"O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places. … He will give strength and power unto His people. Blessed be God."
III
GOD THE KING OF THE WORLD[4]
"God is my King of old; the help that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself."—Ps. lxxiv. 12.
God is either non-existent or His existence is the greatest fact in the universe. Either the secularist is right, and there is nothing but the strong hand and the keen brain of man and woman to better the condition of world, or, if there be a Person who created the great blazing suns that we call stars, whose imagination is so vast that He controls the movements of history, and yet whose knowledge is so detailed that the welfare of the smallest child in a great city is of infinite interest to Him, then the existence of that Person is the greatest fact in all the world. No question is so urgent as what He thinks about a problem; nothing is so vitally important as to know what His mind is, for instance, as to the issue of a great war. No one is quite so foolish as the man or woman who either plans his or her own life, or who propounds schemes for the improvement of the world, without taking the greatest Fact in all the world into account, or keeping in touch with what must be on this hypothesis the ultimate Source and Fount of all power and the Mainspring of all energy. If there be such a Person at all, the wires might as well expect to convey a message apart from the electric current as for the human instrument to avail without God.
Now, I think it is quite likely that among so many busy people, whose brains are all full of practical schemes, there may be some whose minds may have but little hold on God, and may be troubled by doubts, such as I remember my own mind was in the days of my youth. After all, one mind is very much like another; and in speaking to women I have long learnt to speak as if I was speaking to men, and in this I never found myself very much astray. If I tell you, then, how the reality of God gradually dawned upon one mind, it is only in the hope that through what may be similar clouds of vagueness and doubt the light may shine upon another.
1. I think undoubtedly that Nature was, and always will be to most minds, the first help. It does seem more and more impossible that the ordered universe can have been produced by chance. To use an illustration I have often used, especially on Sunday afternoons at the open-air meetings in the parks of East London, if a box of letters cannot throw themselves into a play of Shakespeare because there is clearly the mark of mind in the play, how little credible is it that the atoms of the universe have thrown themselves into the universe as we see it to-day! We feel inclined to add to the trenchant questions in the Book of Job the further question: Who wrapped the atmosphere round the earth and made life possible, and stopped the friction? Was the beauty of the earth the surprise, or the gift to His children of a Being with a beautiful mind? Can the ordered course of the silent stars be produced by any amount of juggling with chance out of the atoms of the world? In other words, Nature drives us not only to God, but to a very strong God and a very present God. If the great astronomer Herschel is right, and every atom has the appearance of a created thing and every law of Nature requires, as he says, the continual application of force, we are "up against"—to use a cant phrase of the day—we are up against the most powerful Person the world has ever known. To swing the smallest planet on its orbit is beyond the power of the greatest superman ever present to the brain of a megalomaniac. But to swing twenty millions of blazing suns, and to swing them every day and every night, and to swing them, as far as we know, for millions of years, requires a Person of surpassing strength and most present power, for it is clear that of this wonderful thing which is done upon earth every day and every night "He doeth it Himself."
2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he went on