Open Fellowship With God
By Horatious Bonar
It
does not seem a strange thing that the creature and the Creator should meet face to face,
and that they should
hold intercourse without any obstructing medium.
We may not understand the mode of communication between the visible and the
invisible, but we can see this, at least, that He who made us can
communicate with us, by the ear or the eye or the touch.
He can
speak and we can hear; and, again, we
can speak and He can hear. His being and ours can thus come together, to
interchange thought and affection: (The intertwining of His Spirit with our spirit in Holy Communion) He giving, we receiving; He rejoicing in us, and we
rejoicing in Him: He loving us, and we loving Him. He can look on us, and we can look on Him;
He "guiding us with His eye" (Psa 32:8), and we fixing our eye on His, as children on the eye of a father, taking in all
the love and tenderness which beam from His paternal look, and sending up to Him our responding look of
filial confidence and love. Not that He has "eyes of flesh, or seeth as
man seeth" (Job 10:4); but He can fix His gaze on us in ways of
His own, and make us feel His gaze, as really as when the eyes of friends look
into each other's depths.
"He
that formed the eye shall He not see" (Psa 94:9). He who made the human
eye to be "the light of the body" (Matt 6:22),--that organ through
which light enters the body,--in order that He might pour into us the glory of
His own sun and moon and stars,--can He not, through some inner eye which we
know not, and for which we have no name, pour into us the
radiance of His own infinite glory,
though He be the "King invisible" (1 Tim 1:17),--He "whom no man
hath seen nor can see" (1 Tim 6:16),--the "invisible God" (Col
1:15). He can touch us; for in Him we live and move and have our being:[2].
And we can lay hold of Him, for He is not
far from any one of us; He is the nearest of all that is near, and the most
palpable of all the palpable. It would seem, then, that open and free and near
intercourse with the God who made us arose from His being what He is, and from
our being what we are: as if it were a necessity both of His existence and of
ours.
That He should be our Creator, and yet be
separated from us, seems an impossibility; that we should be His creatures, and
yet remain at a distance from Him, seems the most unnatural and unlikely of all
relations. Intercourse, fellowship, mutual love, then, seem to flow from all
that He is to us, and from all that we are to Him. We can conceive of no
obstruction, no difficulty in all this, so long as we
remained what He has made us. There could be nothing but the sympathy of heart with heart; a
flow and reflow of holy and unobstructed love.
Unhindered access to the God who made us
seems one of the necessary conditions of our nature; and this not arising out
of any merit or worthiness on the part of the creature, but from the fitness of
things; the adaptation of the thing made to Him who made it; and the impossibility
of separation between that which was made and Him who made it. The life above
and the life below must draw together; heart cannot be separated from heart,
unless something come between to put asunder that which had by the necessity of
nature been
joined together. Distance from God does not belong to our creation, but has come in
as something unnatural, something alien to creative love, something which contravenes the original and fundamental
law of our being.
The
tree separated from its root, the flower broken off from its stem, are the
fittest emblems of man disjoined from God. Such distance seems altogether unnatural.
The want of vital connection, in our original constitution, or the absence of
sympathy, would imply defect in the workmanship, of the most serious kind,--and no less would it
indicate imperfection on the part of the Great Worker. God
made us for Himself; that He might delight in us and we in Him; He to be our portion and we His; He to be
our treasure and we His.[3] He made us after His
own likeness; so that each part of our being has its resemblance or counterpart
in Himself: our affections, and sympathies, and feelings being made after the
model of His own.
We are apt to associate God
only with what is cold and abstract and ideal; ourselves with what is emotional
and personal. Herein we greatly err. We must
reverse the picture if we would know the truth concerning Him with whom is no coldness, no abstraction, no impersonality. The reality
pertaining to the nature of man, is as nothing when
compared with the reality belonging to the nature of Him who created us after
His own image. In so far as the infinite exceeds the finite, in so far does that which we
call reality transcend in God all that is known by that term in man. We are the shadows, He is the substance. Jehovah
is the infinitely real and true and personal: and it is with Him as such that we have to do.
The God of philosophy (And Theology) may be a cold (Impersonal and) abstraction,
which no mind can grasp, and by which no heart can be warmed; but the God of
Scripture, the God who created the heavens and the earth, the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, is a reality,--a reality for both the mind and heart of
man. It is the infinite Jehovah that loves, and pities, and blesses; who bids
us draw near to Him, walk with Him, and have fellowship with Him. It is the
infinite Jehovah who fills the finite heart; for He made that heart for the very
purpose of its being filled with Himself. Our joy is
to be in Him; His joy is in us. Over us He resteth in His love, and in Himself
He bids us rest. Apart from Him creaturehood has
neither stability nor blessedness.
Free and open
intercourse with the God who made us, is one of the necessities of our being.
Acquaintanceship with Him, and delight in Him, are the very life of our created
existence. Better not to be than not to know Him, in whom we live, and move,
and have our being. Better to pass away into unconsciousness or nothingness,
than to cease to delight in Him, or to be delighted in by Him. The loss of God
is the loss of everything; and in having God we have everything. His
overflowing fulness is our inheritance; and in nearness to Him we enjoy that
fulness. He cannot speak to us, but something of that fulness flows in. We
cannot speak to Him without attracting His excellency
towards us. This mutual speech, or converse, is that which forms the medium of
communication between heaven and earth. Man looketh up, and God looketh down:
our eyes meet, and we are, in the twinkling of an eye, made partakers of the
divine abundance.[4] Man speaks out to God what He feels; God speaks out to man
what He feels. The finite and the infinite mind thus interchange their sympathies;
love meets love, mingling and rejoicing together; the full pours itself into
the empty, and the empty receiveth the full.
The greatness of God is no hindrance to
this intercourse: for one special part of the divine greatness is to be able to
condescend to the littleness of created beings, seeing that creaturehood must,
from its very nature, have this littleness; inasmuch as God must ever be God,
and man must ever be man: the ocean must ever be the ocean, the drop must ever
be the drop. The greatness of God compassing our littleness about, as the
heavens the earth, and fitting into it on every side, as the air into all parts
of the earth, is that which makes the intercourse so complete and blessed.
"In His hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind"
(Job 12:10). Such is His nearness to such His intimacy with, the works of His
hands.
It is nearness, not distance, that the
name Creator implies; and the simple fact of His having made us is the assurance
of His desire to bless us and to hold intercourse with us. Communication
between the thing made and its maker is involved in the very idea of creation.
"Thy hands have made me and fashioned me:give me understanding, that I may
learn Thy commandments" (Psa 119:73). "Faithful Creator" is His name
(1 Peter 4:19), and as such we appeal to Him,
"Forsake not the work of Thine own
hands" (Psa 138:8).Nothing that is worthless or unloveable ever came from
His hands; and as being His "workmanship," we may take the assurance
of His interest in us, and His desire for converse with us.[5]
He put no barrier between Himself and us
when He made us. If there be such a thing now, it is we who have been its
cause. Separation from Him must have come upon our side. It was not the father
who sent the younger son away; it was that son
who "gathered all together and took his journey into the far country"
(Luke 15:13), because he had become
tired of the father's house and the father's company.
The rupture between God and man did not
begin on the side of God. It was not heaven that withdrew from earth, but earth
that withdrew from heaven. It was not the father that said to the younger son,
Take your goods, pack up and be gone; it was that son who said, "Father
give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," and who, "not many
days after, took his journey into the far country," turning his back on
his father and his father's house.
"O