23. To Whom Is The Arm Of The Lord Revealed ?

There is no thought that lifts us more effectually above the power of the dust, and consequently, also, above the temptation of the senses, than the confession, that God is a Spirit; and from this a second thought follows naturally: that they that worship Him can not and must not worship Him otherwise than "in spirit and in truth."

This leaves no room for introducing anything whatsoever into the worship of God's Name. that is material, sensual or bound to form.

God is a Spirit. That is the truth which liberates your existence, your soul, your spiritual being from every tie that inwardly would bind and distress you; always, of course, on this condition, that you worship also personally in spirit and in truth with all the love of your heart this God, Who is Spirit.

God is a Spirit. That is the undoing of all idolatry, of all worship of the creature, of all homage paid to images in unholy form and the expulsion of all the sensual cruelty which idolatry brought with it, and which hastened the downfall of the nations of antiquity.

God is a Spirit. That entails a lifting up of your human existence above the whole visible world, and a lifting up of your spirit to those higher spheres of the invisible world, where God dwells in inapproachable light. For if God is a Spirit, then He is independent of this whole visible world; then He existed before the mountains were brought forth; then there is an eternity in which nothing material had been created; and then it follows that all things visible occupy a secondary place. Then the dying of your body is not the dying away of your existence. Then you can continue to be, to exist, even when for a while you yourself will be nothing but spirit. And then you can enjoy already here on earth the deep satisfaction that, if necessary, you can afford to despise the whole world, and yet maintain high spiritual standing, and spiritually be supremely rich in God.

But however potent and superlatively rich the confession that God is a Spirit may be, it, too, has been corrupted by sin.

You feel this most strongly when for a moment you think of Satan and of the whole world of demons. It is true that some people who take pride in the thought that they are "civilized" and "highly developed" take Satan and his demons as mere fabrications of weak minds. All they who believe, agree in this matter that Jesus knows better than these quasi enlightened minds, and that in the Our Father He taught us to pray: "Deliver us from the Evil One," and wove the good rule into it, when He put the prayer in our lips: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." "In heaven" must mean, "by thy angels."

What are angels, except bodiless beings who are only spirit? And if Satan, as can not be otherwise, was not created evil, but was originally a good and brilliant creature of God, who belonged to the world of angels, what else can we do than confess of him that he too is a spirit, and that his demons also are spirits?

Does this make sin purely spiritual, and does this exclude it from the world of sense?

By no means. It does say that all sin, including voluptuousness and drunkenness, originates in the spirit, and that the Psalmist was correct when he prayed (Psalm 19:13): "Keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me; then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."

Nothing is more deplorable, therefore, than that in society at large "immorality" is taken almost exclusively to consist in drunkenness, riotous living or adultery, and that pride, self-glorification, and the consequent low estimate of others, bitterness, anger and the passion of revenge in nowise seem to detract from the good name of celebrated men.

According to this theory, the glorious confession that God is a Spirit, is then abandoned to the most dreadful pantheism, presumptuous pride leading at length to such an exaltation of self that one dreams that he himself is God.

And from this, and this alone, even among christian people the monstrous madness has evolved that having "the new man in the spirit" all responsibility for whatever sensual sins "the old man" might have committed can be thrown to the wind.

This is precisely the error which is now alive again in the school of Maeterlinck - that the pure soul within obtains no stain from the sensual misdeed done by the body.

All this Holy Scripture subverts, by impressing upon the soul, on one hand, that God is a Spirit, and on the other hand, with equal emphasis, that all the doings of God are personal doings, operations of a Person Who stands over against and alongside of us.

God is a Spirit, and therefore not a latent force, not a spiritual impulse pervading the whole creation, not a vague, elusive, inapprehensible working. No, thrice no; but a God Who is our Father Who is in heaven, Who speaks to us, Who listens to our prayer, in Whom throbs a heart full of Divine compassion; a personal God, Who companies and converses with us as friend with friend, Who turns in to pass the night with us, and Who allows us to dwell in His holy tabernacle.

Hence the constant picturing to us of the works of God as personal deeds, and the references to the face of God, to the mouth of the Lord, to the ear He inclines toward us, to the footsteps of the Holy One, to the hand which He lifts up in blessing upon us, and to the arm of power wherewith the Lord our God breaks all resistance.

All this is to a large extent personification, i.e., an application to God of what is found in man. But there is more in it than this. "Shall not he," the Psalmist asks (Psalm 94:9), "that planted the ear not hear? Shall he that formed the eye not see?"

Our eye, ear, mouth, hand and arm are nothing else than bodily manifestations of our inward powers, even those which God so created in us because He fashioned us after His Image. Hence when we say that God hears, sees, speaks, blesses and fights, this is not metaphorically expressed after the manner of men, but it means that all this is original in God, and appears in us merely after His Image.

When Scripture therefore makes mention of an "arm of the Lord, it means that there is not merely a vague outflowing of power from God, but that God Himself governs this indwelling and outflowing power, that He directs it to a given aim, that He uses it or leaves it unused according to His good pleasure; and that when God employs His power, either in our behalf or against us, this is equally, and in a still higher sense, a personal deed, as when we men lift up our arm in order to protect the helpless, or to ward off an assailant.

When Isaiah (53:1) asks: "To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" and we direct this question personally to you: "Is the arm of the Lord revealed to you?" then this does not mean the general, vague question as to whether you believe that there is a God, and that there is a power of God, and whether you acknowledge that this power of God operates; but the question means whether in your experience of life and in that of your soul, you have come to the discovery that this Almighty God deals personally with you, that as God He has turned Himself personally to your person, that He has come in touch with you as a man deals with his friend or with his adversary, and whether in this severe personal relation you have discovered the arm of the Lord, at one time lifting up itself to cover and to protect you, at another time turning itself against you to resist and to vanquish you.

And this is what is lacking in the spiritual life of most people, alas, even among professed followers of the Lord. They lack that which is recorded of Moses; that he endured as seeing the Invisible. They do not understand when of Jacob it is written, that he wrestled with God as with a man. They have a vague sense of influences, of operations, of powers that go out, but they do not see the Holy One, they have no dealings with God as with their Father Who comes to His child, looks upon that child with His eye, listens to it with His ear, lays His hand upon that child and covers it with the arm of His power. They pray to God, they praise Him, but do not meet Him on the way, they do not feel Him near upon their bed, they do not feel His holy breath go out upon them, they do not see that "arm with power" in which lies all their assurance and salvation.

Hence, it can not be insisted upon with sufficient urgency that Bible reading be made a more serious business; that we wean ourselves from the false tendency to take everything in Scripture metaphorically.

The Scripture, the Word of God, is the lamp before our feet and the light upon our path, because it alone engraves these two things upon our soul, both that God is a Spirit and that this God, as our Father Who is in heaven, comes to us by the way, meets us face to face and deals with us as a man with his neighbor.

Invisible and yet seen.