From The Place Where Thou Standest by Paul Scherer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942)

THE GOD WHO LEAVES MAN ALONE
by Paul Scherer

I WANT to put a few verses together here—they belong together —from the fourth and eleventh chapters of Hosea—and let you read them. God is speaking, and He's talking about his chosen people, the Jews. He has led them out of Egypt long years ago, brought them through the desert, given hem a fair land and a kingdom; and now they have repaid Him by running off after other gods! So one day He is represented as saying, quite hopelessly and finally, "Ephraim"—that's the name He uses for the whole nation—"Ephraim is joined to his idols: let him alone." You think it's all over then. That's the end—nothing left now! But you go on anyway, turn the pages, and suddenly come upon this: "I taught Ephraim how to walk, holding him in my arms. How can I give him up? How can I let him go? I am God, not man!"

It sounds like a change of heart, if we may be as bold as the prophets were, and say such a thing of God! He just reverses Himself. In one breath He turns them over to their own desperate course; in the next, He sees them as nothing but toddling children again, and throws His arms about them to keep them from falling! It's a very human sort of picture—I'm quite conscious of that! But if you'll take it—take these two contrary moods, and instead of assuming that they follow one another in point of time, as they seem to do here, hold them together in the mind of God—you'll have a true picture: true to all that we know about Him, from the sternness of His righteous judgments to the glory of His compassion on the cross! That's why I have lifted them out of this amazing old book; because they are living aspects of our own experience!

Let's think first of the fact that there are days and whole weeks and sometimes months when God does seem to leave us alone. You haven't even begun to understand anything about Him until you've realized that He has the most disconcerting way, to say it plainly, of keeping out of sight! You soon discover that the records there are full of it. Jacob wrestled one night with Somebody on the bank of a river—it was how he told the story: and the man said, man or angel, "Let me go, for the day breaketh." God is like that all along, a kind of shadow in the dark; and when the light comes, gone! Always elusive, eternally hidden! "Lo, He goeth by me," cried Job starting up, "and I see Him not!" You hear it from the psalmists, and know on the instant that you are bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh: "My God, my God, why halt Thou forsaken me? Why art Thou so far from helping me and from the words of my crying? As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee"—have you ever been like that?—"while they continue iy say unto me, where is thy God?" "Be not silent to me: lest, ii Thou be silent, I become like them that go down into the pit." "Verily," and Isaiah shakes his head at the mystery of it—"Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself."

We've got to deal with a thing like that; or if we can't deal with it, at any rate we've got to face it! I suppose there are hours without number when you and I want more than we want anything else on earth some clear and intimate knowledge of the love that's on the other side of pain and disappointment and failure. We pray God for some little hint, some glimmer of the wisdom that's on the other side of all our blundering. All that we are strains to catch hold of the purpose beyond some cruel separation, pleads with sweat on its face to be sure of the life that's beyond death. If He would only speak, do something, lay His hand on our shoulder, give us some sign! Break through these dull and unimportant lives of ours with some ringing word we couldn't mistake; have His name announced, someone suggested, like a musician, every time the birds sing; write it at the foot of a sunset, as Michelangelo once wrote his name on the hem of that Madonna's robe, there in St. Peter's, holding the dead body of her son! And you get nothing much but silence, perhaps a shy whisper, maybe some lingering look in the eyes of Christ; for the most part just the gentle pressure of the years! Everything is so still. God is so unobtrusive. His goodness so anonymous. It isn't very surprising to read of how men were once quite persuaded that He wound up this world and sent it spinning down what Tennyson called the "ringing grooves of change," and let it go at that, without paying it any further attention!

But let me tell you, there is more; and it's worse: this withdrawingness of God comes to be a very agony in the soul when you think of how He leaves us alone with our sinning! Many a time do I wish He'd throw Himself into the breach and stop me with some compelling gesture! He never stands there, like the angel at the east of the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep me from taking the wrong road or making the wrong choice! You remember those ghastly years of the last Great War, when day after day and month after month we kept wondering why He let it go on and on and on; why He ever let it happen at all! People asked us about that. They are asking again! And there are the false moves you make, and the sins you love that go on and on too, nobody to stop them; until maybe your home, maybe this whole wide earth, begins to look like nothing so much as what someone called a "colossal might-have-been," a "third-rate ruin of a place!" Where in pity's name does God keep Himself? Will anybody tell me? "Oh," cries the prophet, "that Thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might flow down at Thy presence, and the nations tremble!" "How long shall I cry, and Thou wilt not hear?" Is this picture of Him true? And is it the only true picture there is? "Ephraim is joined to his idols: let him alone!" We've got to deal with that if we can; and if we can't, we've got to face it: in any case!

And here's the secret: we have to set down right by the side of it this fleeting image Hosea gives us of the heart of God at the very moment of that unanswering distance, that solitude! "I taught Ephraim how to walk, holding him in my arms! How can I give him up? How can I let him go? So oft as I speak against him," Jeremiah carries on the figure, "I remember him still!"

It's the figure of One Who is imposing a loneliness not upon man, but upon Himself! I dare say we never think of that. And we should! One Who in the very act of withholding Himself sets upon His own Being "the austere restraints of a holy love!" It wasn't that He didn't care, lifted up stiffly on His throne like some stoic, with a "hard and iron strength" shrugging off this wretched crowd of rebellious Jews, saying, "All right, I'm through: let them go ahead and do as they please"; curling His lip at their antics! He did care! You'll understand this: He was torn as a father is torn who must leave some wayward, angry child to itself before he can ever win it back; waits and remembers it still, yonder in the years that are gone, with its little uncertain steps, his hands holding it up; longs for the day to come when the sulking disobedience will be over; yet denies himself every deep impulse to gather it swiftly in his arms and sweep the barriers down! It must come of itself; and so he waits, just waits!

That's the loneliness of God. I wish you'd think of it, and not of your own, the next time the whole sky seems like brass when you pray; when some hope you've had, some plan, falls down in little pieces about your feet; somebody you love, a husband, a father, taken like that from your home. And you can't for the life of you tell why. And God does nothing! You don't see Him anywhere, and you don't hear Him, and you don't feel His touch across your hot forehead! Not to think then that none of it makes any difference to Him, that He's quite stolid about it all, and untouched, and self-sufficient; but to be sure, indefeasibly sure, that the Love which so straitly keeps itself from breaking through, at the least gesture of your need, is a Love with its eyes wide open, struggling to hold its peace; letting you fail if need be, and caring; letting you sin, and still caring! Standing there with its hands I think gripped tightly behind its back, biting its lips! "I taught Ephraim how to walk, holding him in my arms. How can I give him up? How can I let him go? I am God, not man!"

You see, it had to be that way! You see the why of all this hiddenness on the part of God. It's clear enough to anybody who will stop a moment, and indulge in the luxury of one serious thought! It's because God isn't the kind of God He would have been if we had fashioned Him: forever thrusting Himself on us, leaving us no room, advertising Himself with a tag on every gift of His love, writing His name in every public place—fools do that!—towering over our sin, beating us all to our knees with a vulgar and intruding majesty! That may be the way of dictators; it isn't His way! The Hebrews were quite right in that ancient dread of theirs, that no man might see God and live! That unveiled glory would wither our souls into deserts, as the sun does where it beats down on the plains without the overhanging mercy of any cloud!

It's the God we have, and not the God we'd fashion. Who covets for us this dignity of freedom, and of His own courteous and withdrawing love wraps Himself about in the shadows with silence; solemnizes our hearts, as another has phrased it, in the hush of a great cathedral; searches them with some quick sense of His presence in the still hour of noon, or as twilight falls over the hills! It has always been so. So did God deal with Moses there on Sinai. "I will make my goodness to pass before thee." That's how it was! "I will proclaim my Name softly in thine ear, put thee in a cleft of the rock, cover thee with my hand as I pass!" And at the end of the story it's still quite the same. The great old grizzled chieftain, lined with the years, and soiled with them too, in his way, sits at last on Nebo's lonely mountaintop, gazing out over the land he knows he'll never enter! In his heart, rooted memories of his own sin; but his face—impassive and sublime. There is no God around Who will step in now and set the whole thing right; no facile twist to make a cheerful tale of it: only this grandeur and this stillness, a long look toward the horizon, and God holding His peace, save for a whisper, and a shadow across the path!

Really that's why life to any sober thought can never feel trivial! It feels deep and solemn, with things unsaid, struggling miracles never quite born, as if Someone were holding back, waiting for us to triumph, waiting breathlessly; no easy solutions, no letters of fire anywhere, to give it the air of light opera, no tricks turned, no pampered exits. It feels, this world, like the edge of eternity, where a God dwells Who is willing to die for us, but isn't willing to take the starch out of anybody with a goodness that doesn't know when to hold its tongue, and has forgotten how to be severe, even with itself! Here's the weakness of that familiar play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back G. K. Chesterton once said that the author of it should have made it more of a detective story. There wasn't enough in it of "this great Christian idea of tearing the evil out of men at any cost." There was little or no realization that "things have to be faced, even to be forgiven." In the play, "the redeemer was not a divine detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. He was rather a divine dupe, who couldn't pardon at all because he didn't see anything that was going on!" He just kept moving back and forth all day long saying kind things and keeping his face turned. There's nothing heroic about that! Nothing heroic in a love that's being deceived! The heroic business is to love after you've been undeceived! And that's God's love!

I think you meet that sternness most of all in the solitude which Jesus seems deliberately to have fashioned for himself.

There was something quite appalling about that, and the way he kept choosing it! Yearning for fellowship as few of us will ever yearn; yet never, as Dr. Farmer has pointed out, never tampering with any truth to win it! Setting his own family against him; and officious friends like Peter, who kept begging him to make a few compromises for pity's sake, one or two concessions so that everybody could feel a little easier all around! Off he goes toward Jerusalem and we follow him through desolate days, with the hatred of scribe and Pharisee reaching for stones to hurl at him. We hear their shouting and their gibes, the noise they make in the weird light of the torches, the quick pattering of the disciples' feet as they run away and leave him. And we wonder why, why in the world does he keep going on so grimly, when he could have had a thousand friends by turning a little; going on so grimly down a way that's bound to bring him out alone nailed to a tree against the backdrop of a completely empty sky!

What do you make of it? I hope you don't pity him. Your pity and mine wouldn't do him much honor! It's the heart of God you're seeing, and the inevitable loneliness of it; that awful severity with Himself, keeping back behind the bar of its own lips this eternal passion: "I taught Ephraim how to walk, holding him in my arms! How can I give him up? How can I let him go? I am God, not man!" Jesus died with that pent up inside of him, spreading over our mute earth the speechless shadow of a cross; until now it rests on all that we do to ourselves, and to one another, and to God.

Nothing over any of this broken world now but Calvary; and the silence, which is God waiting, gripping His hands behind His back, biting His lips! "I taught Ephraim how to walk!"

Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself. Whisper Thy name to us softly, and in passing touch our souls with some sense of Thy glory. Redeem us out of all our noisy waywardness by the quiet of Thy love; and out of our poor bondage to these things that we see by Thy free and moving Spirit, unseen and eternal; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

 

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