JESUS MAKING US CERTAIN OF GOD
WELL might Sir Philip Gibbs call this 'The Age of Reason.' In mill, office,
factory, university, our young people are challenged about their religion and
asked to ' prove it.' If no such ' proof ' is forthcoming, then only too often
the young 'valiant for truth' feels a sense of failure. The ' I know ' of faith
seems a weak kind of retreat.
It is not really so. Says Job, in a drama going back to five hundred years before
Christ, ' I know that my Vindicator liveth.' And the knowledge of reason does
not demand vindication. Says Paul in A.D. 67, '1 know in whom I have believed,'
andbelieved ' is not a word of reason. Says
Browning in Abt Vogler in 1867:
God has a few of us whom He whispers
in the ear,The rest may reason and welcome:
'tis we musicians know.
Is this knowledge of faith, relied on by three great
men, separated in time by so vast a gulf of years, really reliable? Can it be
called knowledge?It is a popular fallacy
to suppose that the knowledge of faith is inferior to that of reason, when
the latter depends to some extent on the former for its very conclusiveness.
Even if I say A ‑ B, B ‑ C, therefore A ‑ C, I am thrown back
on faith for124conclusiveness;
faith to believe that the mind is working in a trustworthy way in bringing me
to the conclusion, and that I am not the victim of illusion in the matter of
my processes of thought.
Moreover, the ' knowledge ' of reason is
often a temporary thing. It cannot give itself airs at the expense of faith.
If I pick up a text‑book of chemistry of fifteen years ago, I read, 'we
know that the atom is the smallest conceivable part of an element.' But in these
days of electrons we' know ' that, whatever the smallest conceivable part of
an element may be, it is certainly not an atom. So that the knowledge of reason
is only temporary: the greatest degree of probability based on the facts so
far observed.
The philosophers seem to quarrel. Hegel tells
us that reality is' solely knowable by reasoned thought.' Yet Bergson says that
' some other faculty beside reason is necessary to apprehend reality.' He calls
it intuition. The Christian calls it faith.
There is, then, a knowledge which is above
reason, which is not of the doubtful substance of a guess, but which is the
result of the exercise of the highest faculty known to man ; a faith, or intuition,
if you will, that climbs where reason cannot follow, a faith of soul which soars
when reason often turns back at some crevice of the mind, a glow which leaps
up into a burning, passionate flame: 'I know.'
If, then, you ask me, ' How may I be certain about God ? ' I might, if I were
foolish, take you through the arguments known to every theol 'an, and labelled
with the attractive titles of the cosmological,125teleological,
ontological, and moral. If attheendyou were still sane, you would be unconvinced.
No I If you asked me that question, I would take you to a bed in the Leeds Infirmary,
where, at the moment of writing, a girl is lying dangerously W. She is an Honours
Master of Arts of Cambridge University, who refused many tempting offers and
went to teach little children in a tuberculosis hospital. She has contracted
the disease herself. When I visited her on the day she was admitted into the
hospital, I was telling her about the beautiful wrought‑iron lamp hanging
in my church, in the front panel of which is cut out a cross with red glass
behind the panel, and I was telling her how sometimes we turned all the other
lights in the church out and sat in silent meditation, thinking of the meaning
of that symbol. Later she was operated upon. She told me that as she went under
the anaesthetic, and as the drug began to take possession of her senses, the
last thing she could see in her mind was that red cross, hanging in the darkened
church, and that when she came out of the anaesthetic the cross still shone,
and behind it and above it she saw the face of Jesus. She then added this: '
I was never more certain of anything in my life.' And, if I took you to her
bedside, whatever your experiences may be, you would be convinced that for her
that experience was real.
And then, to convince you further, I should try to show that that experience
is in line with the experience of men and women all through the centuries since
the days when men and women faced persecution and even death, rather than deny
that the126experiences
they had of the Risen Christ were of the nature of reality ; that one found
them confidently affirming 'we know.' They cannot all be wrong; and, if they
be deluded, that delusion is an indictment of the very character of God.
Let me say more of this knowledge. It is certainly a knowledge arrived at through
faith. It is a knowledge which profoundly influences both mind and will, and
yet its source is in the affections. It depends on, and finds its strength in,
a relation with a Person. A homely illustration of it is seen in our common
way of dealing with a friend, who, not sure of the depth of our friendship,
begins to defend himself from some fancied misunderstanding. We do not let him
complete his defence. We interrupt him; we say, ' My dear fellow, you need
not say any more. I know you.' In the same way, if we hear a scandal about some
real friend of ours; if some one says to us, 'Have you heard that so‑andso
did this or said that?' we reply quickly, 'But, my dear chap, it can't be so.
I know him.' And if proof is brought that he has done this thing or said that
thing, we take refuge in another shelter. We say, 'Well, I am sure he will be
able satisfactorily to explain this. You have got it wrong somewhere.' We are
certain because of our faith in the person based on our affection for him, with
a certainty far deeper than any certainty weached by reason, for reason can
never get past the statement that any man is liable to do wrong.
This faith‑knowledge is not one that can be127arrived
at from the creeds. The creeds are great statements of what other people thought
about God, written down, not so much because their authors were convinced that
they had written ultimate truths, as to correct widespread error. And just as
you never get to know a person merely by hearing what others say of him, so
God cannot be known from what people say about Him in the creeds.Further,
certainty about God cannot be derived from the facts of the world any more than
you can gain knowledge of a person by observing what he does or allows. What
knowledge would a child have of his father merely by observing what he did?
Imagine a child of three whose father was a surgeon trying to deduce his father's
nature from what he might be allowed to observe his father doing. The only deduction
he would be able to make was that his father was a kind of glorified butcher
who spent the day cutting people up. So if one simply collected some of the
facts of the world‑pain, sorrow, calamity, evilthe normal conclusion
of reason might just as easily be that God was a devil as that He was good.
Now the knowledge of faith derives its certainty, not from what people have
said about God and not from what God has been observed doing or allowing. but
from a personal relationship, which, in the face of reason's evidence to show
that He is a devil, that evil is more powerful than good, that there is no loving
Providence in life and no tender feeling in the heart of the Creator, believes
in a wise, purposeful, loving God.128
And in the maddening maze of things,
Wben tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed ground my spirit clings;
I know that God is good!
How is
this knowledge gained? It is gained from a vision of God. Let no man pretend
that he is kept from a knowledge of God by reason. Reason will never give men
certainty until it can embrace all facts. The best it can do is to support a
faith reached in another way. The vision of God may break through in many ways;
through beauty and love, art and literature, sorrow and pain, and a thousand
other ministries of God, so that a man leaves all unexplained facts out of his
reckoning, content that they shall all be sub judice, because one moment of
vision has brought him into the world of reality through faith.
But the vision of God which cannot fail to bring certainty is seen in the face
of Jesus Christ. When you have seen God in Jesus you are certain of God for
ever. Afterwards you may find yourself arguing, but your argument will be only
a secondary thing. You will not need the argument any more than, when standing
on some mountain peak and watching the sun rise over the Alps, you need proof
to convince you that the scene before you is one of surpassing loveliness. Something
leaps up within you and says, 'This is beauty,' and when you look at Jesus there
is an inward leap of faith by which you say, ' I know that this is what God
is like ; this is the true nature of the Divine.'
Of course, afterwards, the mists of darkness
may129come
down upon the mind, the soul may even turn away from Jesus, and walk through
paths darkened by unbelief, or sin, or fear, or a terrible indifference; but
even then there is an inner certainty. No man will deny his former experience
or be able entirely to for‑get.I spent
the most glorious holiday of my life in Darjeeling. We were told that from Darjeeling
it was possible to see the mighty giants of the Himalaya mountains rising over
twenty thousand feet into the blue heaven. When we got there we could see nothing
but foothills. For four days we saw nothing but mist all round us. Then one
Sunday morning at dawn we jumped out of bed, and there from our very window
we saw the miracle of Kinchenjunga, the second highest mountain in the world.
I will not attempt to describe it. We held our breath at the majesty and glory
of the vision of that lovely peak, clothed in the unstained radiance of untrodden,
eternal snow, and rising in incomparable grandeur to that incredible height.
Afterwards the clouds came down, obliterating everything, and for five days
we saw nothing. Some people came up, and some of them went down without seeing
anything. Some were in the mood to doubt whether the Himalayas could be seen
from Darjeeling at all, but we knew. We had seen. We were certain. We could
never forget. Nothing could take that away from us though a hundred grey days
of mist had followed.
If some visitor from another planet came down into England in December, how
hard it would be to130tell
him that sometimes, within a few miles from where we talked, *oods are covered
with the misty blue of wild hyacinths; that birds sing; that trees are not brown,
but green ; that one can lie with comfort in the shade of trees and watch the
blue sky through the branches ! How hard it would be to tell I How difficult
to prove by reason I But we know because we have seen, and because we can never
forget, and because, however long the winter lasted, nothing could rob us of
the certainty.
So you must listen and look, and then you will hear and see. Look at Jesus portrayed
in the New Testament or mirrored in books about Him, until He comes out of the
picture and through the lookingglass, alive for you for evermore. Then, though
mists of doubt come down upon the soul, though the waters of affliction surround
it and the tempests of disaster beat down upon it, and we cannot understand
by reason or observation or find help in any saying of man, yet, because we
have once seen, we can never wholly doubt, and out of the depths we, too, shall
be able to cry in complete and perfect certainty, ' I know.'
Whoso hath felt the spirit of the
highest
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, 0 World, tho' thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.
Rather the earth shall doubt, when her retrieving
Pours in the rain, and rushes from the sod,
Rather than he, for whom the great conceiving
Stirs in his soul to quicken unto God.
Aye, tho' thou then shouldst strike
him from his glory
Blind and tormented. maddened and alone,
E'en on a Cross would he maintain his story,
Yes, and in hell would whisper, "I have known."