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

WHEN GOD BREAKS THROUGH
by Paul Scherer

IT IS written in one place of the crowd around Jesus, Then took they up stones to cast at him . . . They were angry because they were afraid; afraid because Jesus was strange. He was outside their experience. He seemed to come from another world, where their traditions and their judgment were not at home. They could make nothing of his claims except blasphemy. They could make nothing of his conduct except deviltry. He was beyond them quite, a kind of weird phantasm. And it sent vagrant chills up and down their spines. That's what happened. I'm certain of it. God was there but in a pattern that was queerer than queer: a poor carpenter "not yet fifty years old," with that in his voice which sounded like the sea, and a touch that was life itself. It made their flesh tingle, and they resented it; resented it with a red surge of anger, which drove the fear clean out of their marrow and left them ready on the instant with their clenched fists to put him out of the way. That's really what sent Jesus to the cross.

Later, it sent defenseless women and children out through iron gates into the arena, where lions prowled about and catching sight of them crouched low with glittering eyes and stealthy feet. It sent John Huss to the stake, and Joan of Arc; because men, even good men, were startled one day to see God, and didn't like His fantastic shape, and lashed out at Him!

Now that isn't a fact which you and I can dismiss with a shrug. It keeps happening dreadfully. If this Eternal Shaper of human destinies, this Spirit Whom we worship brooding over the affairs of men; if He had an idea today, trying to give it roots in this twentieth century, and were using a Stalin for His purpose, or a Hitler, or a Mussolini, or an emperor of Japan: mind you, I'm not saying He is, because I don't know any more than you do; I'm saying if He were, which is at least conceivable—then I do know what some of us would be found doing about it! We'd be found frightened by it, resentful of it, fighting it, bitterly hostile! "Then took they up stones to cast at him . . ." We too should have it in for God if He should ever come to us in some form we didn't recognize!

And the only thing about Him except His love that I'm absolutely convinced of is that He has a way of doing just that: not willfully, not capriciously. He doesn't try to fool us and terrify us and make us strike back at Him. But only because He is beyond us, quite. His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways our ways! An old prophet brought those words up once out of the twisted anguish of his soul; when the people he knew were God's people had all been led away to sit desolate by the waters of Babylon in a land of dumb idols: and yet somehow he was persuaded that above all that puzzling scene a will higher than the heavens was at work still; and no man could chart its movements, not even guess at them!

I want to start with that here. If God is anything, by reason of His very nature as God, He's incalculable! You can't extend to infinity the lines of your reason and arrive at Him. You can't hold up the highest notion you have of Him, stand on tip-toe with it, and say, "There! That's God!" He's other than you think; save as Christ has shown that He's disposed toward us as One that pitieth His children! He dwells in a light that's inaccessible and full of glory, and the motions of His stately Spirit are in a world where your logic and mine rarely if ever make His kind of sense! That's why Luther calls all our philosophy nothing but a blind cow with God: it arrives only at blunders. It flounders in, and what is not God it calls God, and what is God it does not call God: it's forever missing the mark! We're just in a fog about Him—let's say that to ourselves solemnly: all we know is Jesus; we've seen that much of His face. The rest is hidden and none of it is subject to our judgments. I think sometimes if we had, any, even the vaguest conceit of His majesty, we shouldn't be expecting Him to fit so neatly into the tight little categories of the human mind!

Here are our sacred traditions, for instance: there's no guarantee anywhere that He isn't going to break through them. Take this one that's set so firmly in our American way of looking at life. What we call the privilege of property, "the immortality of the status quo," as Dr. Luccock puts it. He says it was phrased in its purest form some years ago when the President of a great railway spoke of "the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given control of the vested interests of this country." You'll not find any cruder statement than that anywhere, no more blunt or honest attempt to identify the Kingdom of Heaven with the order which our own hands have built. And it won't do. Nobody on this earth can blue-print the mind and purpose of God like that! If anyone thinks he's living in a world where his conclusions are final, and his arrangements are permanent because they represent God's arrangements; where the dearest notions he has aren't liable to be bowled over and cracked wide open—he's just been a poor learner in the school of history; and he's little more than a dull-witted believer in a dead God!

I tell you, nothing is safe with a living God around! Not your job, not your health, not your home! Not even the Church! If catastrophe, dismal and complete, smashes its way into all of them, injustice, bereavement, pain—don't look bewildered as if the whole universe had gone crazy, and there were no rhyme in any of it, and no decency at all. This One with Whom we have to do is not as we are. That's all. He doesn't think of us as we think of ourselves. He doesn't limit us by the horizons that we see. He doesn't deal with us as we suppose He should. He doesn't manage His business with the human soul along any of the lines we lay down. It's silly to doubt Him because we can't understand Him! I'd sooner doubt Him if we could! He'd be no longer God!

How then, if He's like that—how shall we behave ourselves toward Him? There, in the eighth chapter of John, Jesus gives this that I've been trying to say its practical point. He describes the sort of person who isn't going to miss that deathless Presence in the world just because it breaks through his own neat and diminutive ideas! "He that is of God," so it runs, "heareth God's words." He's every day on the lookout. He's listening for a Voice. He's waiting and straining to catch some syllable out of eternity.

That kind of taut expectancy is stressed all through the New Testament. The men who set down their experiences here went out into the world sure of Christ, but sure of nothing else under the sun. They didn't know where God was going to come ripping His way into life with the very next breath. For the soul of them they couldn't tell! The days were full of Him. There was no natural order, called law, empty and staring and stupid. There was no routine. They were forever glancing behind them and in front of them and on every side—like people confident that something was going to happen, and it was going to be God, but nobody could possibly say what it was going to look like otherwise. That's the secret of the zest they had, of their passionate concern for living, of the songs they sang. You won't discover a dull page in the Book!

Yet you'll go to your desk in the morning; or you'll stay at home and cook the dinner; or you'll take lunch with a friend: and you won't be thinking God yourself! You'll be treating Him as if He weren't here! You'll be taking it for granted that He's all safely put away in some holy place, with nothing much to do, letting things take their course! I don't blame anybody for getting tired of that. But I've lived long enough to know it's our own fault! We go walking around alone on Monday, and call it blue. Tuesday is just a tough day at the office. Wednesday and Thursday the market drops. Friday nothing happens, and Saturday we play golf. You wouldn't recognize your own brother, honestly you wouldn't, if you locked him out of the whole week like that! We've got to begin living life as it is, instinct with God; unless we're willing to have Him seem like a stranger from one year's end to the other, and are quite ready ourselves to line up with those who never do know Who He is when He breaks through, but stoop down and start picking up stones! "He that is of God, heareth God's words!"

And Jesus defines this man of God as one who keeps His saying. He's always on the right side of things, because he's been doing God's will in Christ; never will miss the step of this One Whom he's been loving and serving his whole life through! "If a man keep my saying . . ." It isn't at all a question, you see, as to whether or not Christ's sayings make sense. Maybe they don't. No matter. When he says that any separate soul is worth more than the whole world in God's scales, that sounds ridiculous. But are you willing to say Yes to it, and start living by it; for no other reason on earth than that he said it? When he says that love will work and hate won't, it's just a silly jumble to me: especially out there in business, where we're likely to be cheated out of everything we've got: and yonder among the nations, where loving anybody looks like suicide! But are you willing to take Christ's word for it, just because it is his word? Nonsense to you, sound logic to God! "If a man keep my saying . . ." We've no business, you and I, to be arguing about it: whether or not it's a good thing to be internationally-minded, or to ignore racial barriers and class distinctions, or to forgive seventy times seven: it's all foolishness, where our wits are concerned, and on the basis of our judgments; but Christ says it's God's wits that count and His judgments that matter! Are you ready to quit debating it? We'd better be, if we're in the least concerned about recognizing God when we stumble on Him, however strange and unexpected His fashion! It's the people who've stopped talking about His way and started moving along it that catch sight of Him when He breaks through, and know Who He is!

Then there's this other equipment, faith: simply a bare, defenseless confidence that in and under and over and around all things whatsoever is God: the love and wisdom and power and abiding presence of Christ! "Before Abraham was, I am." That was Jesus' way of putting it. Whatever happened or when, if you looked up you'd find His face there; and in it would be nothing but tenderness and the sure knowledge of victory! Victory for men and women beaten against a wall, who can still leave their anxieties to Him: all these things they never will understand, that harass their souls; certain that He's going to work it out in the end. We can't see how or why God deals with us as He does: any more than a spaniel in a living-room can grasp the mysterious movements of his master's thought. His master has the facts and the spaniel hasn't. And when you don't have the facts nothing makes sense! People who can leave their lives to God and stake all there is on His handling of them! Job did that, when calamity came rushing in on him. It stripped him of everything that made the months and the years tolerable, and through no fault of his own! But there beyond it was God, and the far-off, desperate cry of Job's soul still lingers on the earth: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust Him!"

It happened some time ago to a man of whom I read. He had lost an uncommonly brilliant and promising son. The lad was killed in a railroad accident. And when the news came, in the first paroxysm of his grief, the father strode over to the pastor of his church. He didn't even ring the bell. He walked into the house, through the library, seized his minister roughly by the arm, and cried, the tears not yet dry on his cheeks, "Tell me, sir, where was God when my son was killed?" And in that terrible moment the other answered, "My friend, God was just where He was when His own son was killed!" Jesus could commit his life to those hands. Can't you and I commit ours, and the lives of others? And even in the hour of darkness hold on in the dark!

"Then took they up stones to cast at him . . ." If there's any taut and waiting expectancy in your heart; if there's any steadiness in your feet, as you keep walking down the way of Christ's will; if there's any stubborn, ultimate confidence in your soul, as you stand there at your wits' end looking for God: you'll never be found on that wrong side of things when He breaks through—with fear in your marrow, and anger on your face, and stones in your hands; and God yonder—to Whom all things are subject. Who shall yet make them prosper and serve you! God in Jesus, holding out His last gallant bid for the love that should be in your eyes!

God, our Father, forasmuch as Thou art a living God, keep us alive also unto Thee. May we remember through all the days how great Thou art; and cleave for ourselves, of all that we count most certain, but to this one thing: that Thou art in earnest, bitterly in earnest; and that Thy will for us is forever good. We ask it for Jesus' sake. Amen.

 

[Home]